Conrad Wise Chapman and the Mexican Landscape

This thesis focuses on several paintings of the Mexican landscape produced by Conrad Wise Chapman (1842 – 1910) and held by the Valentine Richmond History Center in Richmond, Virginia. Chapman lived in Mexico from 1865 to 1867 and from 1883 to 1908 (with a few short absences), and during this period, produced a large number of landscapes, which are the subject of this thesis and will be considered as an amalgamation of both nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting and traveler-art. It is the purpose of this study to demonstrate that Chapman’s artistic style embodies both classical components of landscape painting and characteristics commonly associated with traveler-art. This investigation of Chapman’s Mexican oeuvre provides significant insight into a period of the artist’s career that has long been neglected, and it examines several works of art not yet considered by scholars