A painter of Cuban life: Victor Patricio de Landaluze and nineteenth-century Cuban politics (1850--1889)

In the historiography of Cuban art, Victor Patricio de Landaluze (1828-1889), the painter, caricaturist and illustrator holds a revered yet, paradoxical place. Ironically this Spanish painter's scenes of Cuban daily life where white Creole elites, rural peasants (or guajiros), and free and enslaved Afro-Cubans interact in urban and rural spaces have earned him the title "the most Cuban painter of his time." Most scholars argue that Landaluze documented colonial life by depicting Cuban social groups, a claim enabled by their adoption of the terms of his chosen genre: costumbrismo. Costumbrismo is a late-eighteenth to nineteenth-century genre where the social types and traditions of a people or a nation were thought to be accurately recorded through text (poetry and prose) and image. This documentary claim, however, is still mostly made about Landaluze's costumbrista painting, illustration and lithography, since his political caricatures are clearly Peninsular indictments of nineteenth-century Cuban reform and independence movements. As a result of this tension between Landaluze's so-called objective painting and overtly political caricature, art historical scholarship remains either fixed on the paradox of a Spanish-loyalist artist whose work has become emblematic of Cuban culture, or divorces Landaluze's costumbrismo from his caricature.;This dissertation moves beyond this impasse by re-inserting Landaluze's work in its specific nineteenth-century milieu. By engaging and historically situating the full spectrum of Landaluze's oeuvre, I consider the thematic and aesthetic relationships between Landaluze's art and the politics of race, colonialism and national independence in nineteenth-century Cuba. In contrast to previous scholarship, I reveal an active and dialectic relationship between the artist and the tumultuous times in which he lived.;I argue that his work advances Spanish colonial discourse and is critical of Cuba's nascent cultural and political proto-nationalism. Landaluze's Peninsular-identified politics were informed by his own political activities on the island, which included his lengthy service as an officer with the Spanish military. Furthermore, his critique shifted over his thirty-nine year residence on the island. During his first ten years in Cuba, his satirical illustration and burgeoning costumbrismo criticized Annexationism (a movement that sought to integrate Cuba to the United States) and engaged the debate over slavery. During the 1860s, Landaluze's satire begins to incorporate Afro-Cuban subjects (especially the mulata as a Cuban type), relying on this racialized imagery as his preferred mode of political critique. This proved effective as elite Cuban Creoles sought to reform the colonial contract by, in part, addressing the issue of slavery that had wedded the colony to Spain. Reformist Creoles advocated a platform of whitening---that is the desire to dilute the Afro-Cuban population through miscegenation with lower-class whites. Landaluze's mulatas---who generally interacted with elite Creole men and maintained her associations with darker skinned Afro-Cubans---rejected the possibility of whitening and with it the possibility that the Cuban colony could ever control its racial imbalance. Landaluze's work from this moment on relied on the specter of Africanization---the fear and threat that unless Cuba remained a colony, its Afro-Cuban population would control the island by way of insurrection or miscegenation---to condone an enduring Spanish colonial presence on the island. During and after Cuba's first major insurrection against colonialism (the Ten Years' War; 1868-1878), Landaluze perused painting in tandem with his political caricature. In both forums, he continued to rely on racialized representations to critique the rebellion that was itself shifting the debate on race in Cuban society. In the end, my dissertation tracks and analyzes Landaluze's evolving political critique, showing how his work consistently supported Spanish colonial discourse and increasingly relied on discourses of race to undermine the politics of nationalism in colonial Cuba.