VIEWS FROM THE FRONT:

IMAGES AND TEXTS FROM THE PARAGUAYAN WAR

Abstract

Multiplied in official documents, first-person accounts and journalistic chronicles, the Paraguayan War (also called of the Triple Alliance, Guasu War, 1864-1870) also generated a great proliferation of images. Through illustrations, paintings and photographs, they provided the extensive visual coverage given by the press during the conflict, as well as the subsequent historical representations that, at the time and in the following decades, populated the national imagination of the victors and the vanquished. Illustrated periodicals, such as the Paraguayan trench newspaper Cabichuí, printed in the fortifications of Humaitá, or the official press that covered the conflict based in the capitals, such as A Vida fluminense and Semana Ilustrada in Rio, or El Semanario de Avisos y Conocimientos útiles in Asunción, as well as autobiographical narratives and historical treatises, were indispensable sources for following the developments and disasters of the war during the present day. From the 1870s onwards and in the following decades, the war episodes would be reminisced and re-evaluated from opposing positions, both in historical interpretation essays, autobiographical narratives and historical novels, and through the visual arts sponsored by national states or public organisations, as in the case of some of the works by Victor Meirelles and Pedro Américo in Brazil, and Adolf Methfessel and Cándido López in Argentina, among other painters who dedicated themselves to the subject. Part of this vast textual and iconographic production relating to the devastating conflict will be analysed in this article.