The second, in 1847, gave him an opportunity to record the landscapes and physical types of the Río de la Plata—in such abundance that an estimated 200 paintings remained in the hands of local collectors—and to refute his friend and admirer Humboldt, or rather a simplistic interpretation of Humboldt's theory, according to which the painter's talent should have been exercised solely in the more topographically and botanically exuberant regions of the New World.

But the refutation had in fact been foreshadowed ten years earlier, during Rugendas's brief and dramatic first visit, which was cut short by a strange episode that would mark a turning point in his life.

His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all well-known genre painters; one of his ancestors, Georg Philip Rugendas, was famous for his battle scenes.

The first German Rugendas was a master clockmaker; all the rest were painters.

It was Johan Moritz's great-grandfather, Georg Philip Rugendas (1666–1742) who founded the dynasty of painters.

Christian (1775–1826), the son of Georg Philip Junior, was the father of our Rugendas, who brought the cycle to a close by painting the battles of another warrior king, Napoleon.

Initially apprenticed to Adam, a battle painter, he began taking classes in nature painting at the Munich Academy.

The "nature" favored by buyers of paintings and prints was exotic and remote, so he would have to follow his artistic calling abroad, and the direction his travels would take was soon determined by the opportunity to participate in the voyage mentioned above.

The German painter's Fitzroy was Baron Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, who, during the crossing of the Atlantic, turned out to be so "obdurate and hare-brained" that when the boat arrived in Brazil Rugendas parted company with the expedition and was replaced by another talented documentary painter, Taunay.

Rugendas, meanwhile, after four years of travel and work in the provinces of Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, Espiritu Santo, and Bahia, returned to Europe and published an exquisite, illustrated book entitled A Picturesque Voyage through Brazil (the text was written by Victor Aimé Huber using the painter's notes), which made him famous and put him in touch with the eminent naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, with whom he was to collaborate on a number of publications.

Rugendas's second and final voyage to America lasted seventeen years, from 1831 to 1847.

(An incomplete catalog, including oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings, numbers 3,353 works.) Although the Mexican phase is the best represented, and tropical jungles and mountain scenes constitute his most characteristic subject matter, the secret aim of this long voyage, which consumed his youth, was Argentina: the mysterious emptiness to be found on the endless plains at a point equidistant from the horizons.

Rugendas was a genre painter.

Humboldt did not want his disciple to waste his efforts south of the tropical zone, and in his letters he was generous with recommendations such as the following: "Do not squander your talent, which is suited above all to the depiction of that which is truly exceptional in landscape, such as snowy mountain peaks, bamboo, tropical jungle flora, groups composed of a single plant species at different ages; filiceae, lataniae, feathery-fronded palms, bamboo, cylindrical cactuses, red-flowered mimosas, the inga tree with its long branches and broad leaves, shrub-sized malvaceous plants with digitate leaves, particularly the Mexican hand plant (Cheirantodendron) in Toluca; the famous ahuehuete of Atlisco (the thousand-year-old Cupressus disticha) in the environs of Mexico City; the species of orchids that flower beautifully on the rounded, moss-covered protuberances of tree trunks, surrounded in turn by mossy bulbs of dendrobium; the forms of fallen mahogany branches covered with orchids, banisteriae, and climbing plants; gramineous species from the bamboo family reaching heights of twenty to thirty feet, bignoniaceae and the varieties of Foliis distichis; studies of pothos and dracontium; a trunk of Crescentia cujete laden with calabashes; a flowering Teobroma cacao with flowers springing up from the roots; the external roots of Cupressus disticha, up to four feet tall, shaped like stakes or planks; studies of a rock covered with fucus; blue water lilies in water; guastavia (pirigara) and flowering lecitis; a tropical jungle viewed from a vantage point high on a mountain, showing only the broad crowns of flowering trees, from which the bare trunks of the palms rise like a colonnade, another jungle on top of the jungle; the differing material physiognomies of pisang and heliconium .

This system provided the basis for the "genre" of painting in which Rugendas specialized.

After a brief stay in Haiti, Rugendas spent three years in Mexico, from 1831 to 1834.

He set out at the end of December 1837 from San Felipe de Aconcagua (Chile), accompanied by the German painter Robert Krause, with a small team of horses and mules and two Chilean guides.

Rugendas and Krause got on well and had plenty to talk about, although both were rather quiet.

The only thing that secretly bothered Rugendas was the irremediable mediocrity of Krause's painting, which he was not able to praise in all sincerity, as he would have liked.

Krause, for his part, was in awe of Rugendas, and the pleasure they took in each other's company was due in no small measure to the disciple's devotion.

The difference in age and talent was not obvious, because Rugendas, at thirty-five, was timid, effeminate, and gawky as an adolescent, while Krause's aplomb, aristocratic manners, and considerate nature narrowed the gap.

There was a risk of the mountains becoming a habit, as they obviously were for the guides, who charged by the day.

Krause was not alone in his appreciation of Rugendas's work.

Krause would often refer, half jokingly, to this extraordinary triumph, and in the solitude of the Cordillera, with no one else there to see, Rugendas would smile and accept the compliment, which was accompanied but not undercut by gentle, affectionate mockery.

The horses panted, began to stumble, and it was time to stop for a rest; the mules were perpetually grumpy.

One morning Krause said that he had had nightmares, so their conversations that day and the next turned on moral mechanics and methods of regaining composure.

That was Rugendas's idea, probably influenced by the military painting of his ancestors.

For some years, Rugendas had been experimenting with a new technique: the oil sketch.

The effect on Rugendas's daily practice was to punctuate the constant flow of preparatory sketches for serial works (engravings or oil paintings) with one-off pieces.

Rugendas would have liked to depict an earthquake, but he was told that it was not a propitious time according to the planetary clock.

Rugendas would have paid to paint one.

He returned to the loading station the next day and the day after, armed with paper and charcoal.

What mattered to Rugendas, however, was not at the end of the line but at its impossible midpoint.

But perhaps one day he would retrace his South American journey in reverse (a poetic idea that came to him on the spur of the moment): once again he would see all that he was seeing now, speak all the words he was speaking, encounter the smiling faces before him, identical, not a day younger or older .

For some reason (no doubt because they were not practicing their art), Rugendas and Krause, in their daily conversations on horseback, hit upon a relation between painting and history.

Now, taking this as his starting point, Rugendas went one step further and arrived at a rather paradoxical conclusion.

Rugendas kept delaying the beginning of his task, until one day he discovered that he had more reasons for doing so than he had realized.

From time to time they noticed that the old guide was straining anxiously to hear something.

That afternoon, after two days of involuntary fasting, the horses reached the limits of their endurance.

Krause was in favor of grinding up some biscuits, mixing them with water and milk, patiently feeding the horses with this paste, waiting a few hours for them to calm down, and setting off again in the cool of the evening.

He spurred his horse to a gallop, and it responded with an explosion of nervous energy; horse and rider were drenched with sweat, as if they had just emerged from the sea.

The gray cones of the hills, on which Rugendas fixed his gaze, kept shifting as he rode on in a straight line; without becoming noticeably bigger, they multiplied and began to spread apart; one slipped around behind him surreptitiously.

The horse began to turn beneath him.

Completely numb, Rugendas tugged at the reins haphazardly, until they slipped from his hands.

Not only that, the horse's magnetized coat held Rugendas in place as they flew through the air.

It was not until the morning of the following day that Krause and the old guide discovered them.

The guide, who had recovered his guiding skills, remembered some ranches nearby and pointed the way.

Two days later Rugendas began to ride again and write letters (the first was to his sister in Augsburg, presenting his misfortunes in an almost idyllic light; by contrast, the picture he painted for his friends in Chile was resolutely grim).

Leaving aside the state of his face for the moment, the exposed nerve, which had caused the unbearable suffering of the first days, had been encapsulated, but although this meant the end of the acute phase, the nerve ending had reconnected, more or less at random, to a node in the frontal lobe, from which it emitted prodigious migraines.

They came on suddenly, several times a day; everything went flat, then began to fold like a screen.