Emeric Essex Vidal

Emeric Essex Vidal (29 March 1791 – 7 May 1861) was an English watercolourist and naval officer. His opportunities for travel, his curiosity about local customs and human types, and his eye for the picturesque, led him to make paintings which are now historical resources. A landscape painter and a costumbrista, he was the first visual artist to leave records of the ordinary inhabitants of the newly emergent Argentina and Uruguay, including the first depictions of gauchos. He also left records of Canada, Brazil, the West Indies and St Helena, where he sketched the newly deceased Napoleon.
No full-length biography of Vidal yet exists; only brief accounts written from the viewpoints of the lands he visited. Although a number of his watercolours have been published as hand-coloured aquatints, or by modern printing methods, or sold at auction, it is plausible that most have been lost or await rediscovery in private collections.
Vidal was born on 29 March 1791 at Brentford, Middlesex, the second son of Emeric Vidal and Jane Essex. His family background was, by the standards of the day, highly unconventional.
His father, Emeric senior, was baptised in La Patente, a French-speaking Huguenot church in Soho, London. (The Vidal family had emigrated to England from France to escape persecution following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). The Vidals thought they had come from the Basque country originally.)
The Huguenot community, who were Calvinists, were officially tolerated in England; nevertheless, they were a religious and linguistic minority, successful and self-confident, sometimes attracting popular hostility. They had a sense of 'otherness' and usually did not intermarry with the host population. Though born in England, in law Emeric senior was a foreigner who could not acquire British citizenship except by obtaining a private act of Parliament, which he did in 1773. During the wars against France he was a naval agent (a civilian position similar to a banker). He was a secretary to admirals Sir Robert Kingsmill, John Lockhart-Ross and Robert Duff.
Emeric senior married out of the Huguenot community by wedding Jane Essex in an Anglican ceremony at St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, London, in 1801 by which time the couple already had a teenage daughter and three sons. Jane Essex's antecedents are not known. A Jane Essex was baptised at the Foundling Hospital in 1760; baby girls abandoned there were usually brought up to be domestic servants. Whatever his mother's origins, until he was ten years old Vidal and his siblings were literally bastards, a very stigmatised status at the time.
The Vidal brothers were physically small but all three pursued naval careers in the Napoleonic wars and afterwards. The eldest was Richard Emeric Vidal (1785–1854), who was in battles and skirmishes in which 121 vessels were captured or destroyed; the youngest was Alexander Thomas Emeric Vidal (1792–1863), a hydrographer who charted many unknown waters and became a Vice-Admiral. After their retirement from the Navy the oldest and youngest brothers bought land and became pioneers in Upper Canada.
In 1814 Emeric Essex Vidal courted Anna Jane Capper. Her father, a pluralist clergyman with a private income, opposed the match, probably because of Vidal's social origins; but the couple eloped and were married — at St Bride's, Fleet Street, like the Vidal parents 13 years before them. They had six children, one of whom, Owen Emeric Vidal, was the first Anglican bishop in West Africa and, like his father, a gifted linguist. He knew Tamil, Malay and Yoruba.
In 1832 Vidal was badly wounded and, although he volunteered for another tour of duty and struggled on for five years in frequent pain, he was obliged to retire from active service on half pay which, owing to an anomaly in the naval regulations, was only 4 shillings a day. Despite that, he inherited a 15-room house standing in 18 acres of meadow. After his first wife's death in 1846 Vidal married Anne Humfry. They did not live in penury.
Emeric Essex Vidal died in Brighton on 7 May 1861.
Vidal entered the Royal Navy at the age of 15 as a volunteer (i.e. an ordinary seaman) on board HMS Clyde, serving under Captain Edward Owen. In 1807 the Portuguese royal court sailed for Rio de Janeiro, escorted by the British Royal Navy, to escape from Napoleon's troops. Two South American art historians have claimed that Vidal was on that expedition, it being his first sight of Brazil. No water colours painted on that journey have been identified, if indeed he went on it.
In 1808 Vidal was promoted to the rank of purser. He performed that function on board several ships including HMSS Calypso, Calliope, Speedy, Bann, Hyacinth, Gloucester, Ganges, Asia, Spartiate and Dublin.
Essentially, the purser handled a ship's business affairs; so, when an admiral needed to appoint a secretary, he naturally chose a purser. Like his father before him, Vidal was Secretary to several flag officers. The post demanded abilities unusual in a seaman. The Naval and Military Gazette explained why:
Vidal was Secretary to Sir Graham Moore ( Baltic, 1813); Sir Edward Owen (Canada, 1815); Sir Robert Lambert (Cape and St Helena, 1820-1); Sir Edward Owen (West Indies, 1823); Sir Robert Otway (South America, 1826–29); and Sir Graham Hamond (South America, 1834–36). In those stations, therefore, it was Vidal's job to become the "oracle" who could be consulted on local affairs and politics. Being a linguist, he had to interpret for admirals and senior officers on their shore visits.
Relevantly, a British naval officer was strongly encouraged to develop his abilities for observation and drawing. Officers routinely painted coastal features — in colour — and put them in logs and charts. "The common thread ... was the belief that ...'seeing is an art which must be learnt'."
In 1832 Vidal was seriously wounded in the Portuguese War of the Two Brothers. He was acting as interpreter to the admiral's flag captain and they went on shore in Porto to observe a Dom Pedro military position which, however, came under attack from a Dom Miguel force. He was pierced through the body (two sources say through the liver) by a musket ball. A British officer told the Sunday Times:
Some newspapers reported he was dead. One source recalled that Vidal was brought back to a British ship bleeding, in great pain, in an open boat.
Vidal made a recovery and was "still serving, although almost worn out", as late as August 1836 aboard HMS Dublin at Rio de Janeiro, where he wrote a memorial to the Admiralty, complaining that admirals' secretaries got no pensions.
In this article a selection of Vidal's works is arranged in approximate chronological order so that his development may be perceived. It can be seen that he started as a landscape painter.
In 1815, although on half pay, he visited the Canadian Great Lakes, where his younger brother Alexander Thomas Emeric was employed on surveying service, and acted for a time as Secretary to flag officer Commodore Owen. He made or copied a number of military maps and sketches. Whilst in the country he made various watercolour drawings, including Niagara Falls, which hangs in the National Gallery of Canada.
In the (then) recent naval war between the United States and Great Britain on Lake Ontario both sides had "constructed immense fleets in areas which were only sparsely settled", including large sea-going ships (the "Battle of the Carpenters"). They were built at the rival yards of Sackets Harbor and Kingston Royal Naval Dockyard.
Vidal's watercolour Sackett's Harbour, Lake Ontario taken 20th September 1815 is a panoramic view of the American facility, possibly sketched surreptitiously because of the still tense situation. It contains military intelligence now of considerable historical value.
His Commodore's House in the Naval Yard, Kingston, which is in the Royal Military College of Canada, documents the British/Canadian facility, with a ship actually under construction (see the oxen) — it could not be guaranteed that the peace treaty would hold. Its depiction of the Commodore's house has been studied by Canadian architectural historians for the light it throws on the origins of the Ontario Cottage type.
Vidal is sometimes listed as a Canadian artist. The Massey Library of the Royal Military College holds further images by Vidal.
From May 1816 to end-September 1818 Vidal was purser of the 24-gun HMS Hyacynth, which was based in Rio de Janeiro. Wrote Luciana de Lima Martins:
British naval painters of the time were stunned by their first sight of Rio de Janeiro, its tropical light, its exotic flora and its scenery. Until 1930 collectors supposed all but three of Vidal's Brazilian paintings had been lost. It then emerged that his great-granddaughter had a collection of 25 including many Brazilian watercolours. On this visit Vidal painted landscapes — "they give us exact details of that fantastic vegetation, and architectural representations of great value, [but] the human figure appears as merely accessory".
The most impressive, not reproduced here, is the densely detailed 600 x 90 cm Panorama of Rio de Janeiro. An Argentine critic wrote that, as a document, it was the most interesting view of Rio de Janeiro in existence.
In 1816 Argentina was fighting its war of independence with Spain. Across the River Plate rebellious Uruguay had been invaded by Portuguese/Brazilian forces. In August HMS Hyacinth arrived in Buenos Aires to protect British property. Although based in Rio, such ships came and went; Vidal observed Buenos Aires during the next two years.
Very few painters had visited the region at all. Images of it scarcely existed. Local artists, such as there were, specialised in religious subjects or elite portraiture; they had no motive to paint the ordinary inhabitants and their customs. In contrast, naval officers, "however junior, were encouraged to keep their eyes and ears open, and to take notes on the manners and customs of the native people they might encounter. Governments of the day were largely dependent on the observations of intelligent travellers."
The Buenos Aires that Vidal came to had no splendid scenery to compare with Brazil's, wrote an Argentine critic. "Everything was monotonous, without colour; the immense plain losing itself in the distant horizon. Its architecture was poor and without character." But what Buenos Aires could and did offer him, pictorially, was its human types, their strange implements, their rural and urban tasks and the animals of the Pampas.
But he was, till then, the only one
Thus it was that Vidal was the first, and for a time, the only artist to paint the everyday scenes of life in Buenos Aires and Uruguay. Wrote S. Samuel Trifilo:
Twenty-four Vidal watercolours were afterwards published — as hand-coloured aquatints with an accompanying text — by London publisher Rudolph Ackermann under the title Picturesque Illustrations of Buenos Ayres and Monte Video (1820). Four of those prints are reproduced in this section:
Vidal's horse drawings might seem quaint and somewhat deficient, almost caricatures; but an Argentine horse expert has denied this, saying "Vidal's suite of watercolours about the River Plate horse .. always show it with the same type characteristics that we find in pure bred specimens today, 100 years later". Criollo horses were small but tough.
Few buildings that Vidal saw on that visit survive. An exception is the historic Buenos Aires Cabildo (city hall), the first in South America to defy the Spanish empire (1810). It can be discerned in his The Plaza, or Great Square of Buenos Ayres, left background. It may be compared with the present-day building, truncated by street development.
"In the annexed view", wrote Vidal, "the quinteros (farmers) are seen coming to the market from the country.. They carry their live animals, tied by the heels and thrown over their horses' backs... A baker's man, a negro-slave, is introduced; and here it may be observed, that slavery at Buenos Ayres is perfect freedom compared with that among other nations... the treatment of slaves [is] highly honourable to the Spanish character."
Vidal's images are a seemingly inexhaustible source of information, their detail continually examined by historiographers. All these are Ackermann's prints.
The over-abundance of animals led to their abuse, wrote Vidal. "The human being who to his fellow-man is hospitable and compassionate, is to his beast the most barbarous of tyrants".
Alejo González Garaño, the foremost Vidal collector, thought The Market Place of Buenos Ayres best evoked the old city.
The Church of San Isidro, taken from doña Mariquita Thompson's is of interest for several reasons. Unlike the other Argentine watercolours in this section, it was not chosen for publication by Ackermann and hence did not go through the mediation of his engravers and colourists — London artists who had never been to Buenos Aires. It can be discerned whether it less "muddy" than Ackermann's productions. It was drawn from the summer estate of Mariquita Sánchez de Thompson, a prominent Argentine patriot and revolutionary who kept a literary salon. It shows the town of San Isidro with its early eighteenth century church. "It has great iconographic value, because it makes us know for the first time the aspect of one of those rarely depicted towns of Buenos Aires province, with its miserable dwellings of primitive architecture beside impassable streets", though today the town is prosperous.
In 1815 Napoleon was exiled to the island of St Helena. In 1820 HMS Vigo, flagship of Rear-Admiral Lambert, arrived in St Helena and stayed until September 1821.
The political situation on the island was rife with intrigue. Opposition politicians in England were trying to embarrass the government. It was Lambert's job to make sure Napoleon did not escape by sea. Vidal was Lambert's secretary.
Napoleon had stomach cancer. On 5 May 1821, at about sunset, he died. Next morning, five amateur artists who happened to be present on the island drew him on his deathbed.
In common acceptation, the most talented of the five was Vidal. He wrote: "The head was beautiful, the expression of the face calm and mild, and not the slightest indication of suffering."
It is known that Vidal attended Napoleon's funeral and interment, which he painted. He also painted several views of the island. All these are believed to be in private collections. The one in the illustration is thought to date from 1822.
In 1823 Vidal transferred to the West India station, serving on board HMS Gloucester as secretary to his old commander Commodore Owen. The squadron was based at Port Royal, Jamaica, formerly Caribbean headquarters of pirates, but now of the Royal Navy, whose job it was to put them down.
Pirates were troublesome, and were vigorously pursued. An American squadron commanded by Commodore David Porter was engaged on similar duty. Less than ten years before, the two countries had been at war, but now the local commanders acting on their own initiative evolved a cooperation. Owen's letters to Porter — drafted by his secretary in ultra-courteous language — exemplify Vidal in his professional role of floating diplomacy secretariat. An extract:
The letter continued:
From December 1822 to July 1829 Vidal was back in the South America squadron. In Brazil he turned the tropical light to advantage in some ship paintings e.g. HMS Ganges at Anchor and Drying Her Sails off Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil was at war with Argentina and the Royal Navy often had to cruise to Buenos Aires and Montevideo to protect British shipping. Most of his surviving works of that period were created in Brazil.
Exceptions are The Mole at Monte Video — Sunrise (1828) and his colossal Mode of Lazoing Cattle in Buenos Ayres (1829)
Vidal dedicated this huge (122 x 185 inches) watercolour to Lady Ponsonby, wife of the British ambassador to Buenos Aires.
Whether his Portuguese watercolours were affected by his near-fatal wound has not yet been discussed in the literature.
In his last tour of duty Vidal was secretary to Sir Graham Hamond who, from his station headquarters at Rio de Janeiro was supposed to suppress the slave trade — both on the Atlantic and Pacific shores of South America — when he had only "one Third Rate, one Fifth Rate, five sloops, two brigantines and a gun-brig".
The situation demanded the utmost diplomatic tact. Though slavery was legal and widespread in Brazil, there was an abolitionist faction in politics, and the Empire of Brazil had signed a convention to ban the transatlantic trade. Slave ships captured by the Royal Navy were brought to Rio de Janeiro and tried before Brazilian-British mixed courts. The slaves, already sickly, could not be liberated from the hot, overcrowded, unsanitary vessel until she was condemned; but, since adjudication took time, quite a few died — or, on one occasion, were abducted by an armed gang. Means had to be provided for looking after these unfortunates (wrote Commodore Hamond to London in a letter drafted by Vidal), else
On this station Vidal once again developed a characteristic style of painting. In these years, far from home, not seeing his wife and children for years at a time, often racked with pain, he must have perceived the locale in a new way.
A very different watercolour (1835) serves to document an aspect of life on the South America station. The high-status individuals attending this Rio de Janeiro ball include the Governor General of India and the best-selling novelist Emily Eden.
In 1820 the London Anglo-German publisher Rudolph Ackermann brought out Picturesque Illustrations of Buenos Ayres and Monte Video: Consisting of Twenty-Four Views Accompanied with Descriptions of the Scenery, and of the Costumes, Manners, &c of the Inhabitants of those Cities and their Environs by E.E. Vidal. It is a colour plate book: the watercolours were reproduced by the aquatint process and each print was hand-coloured. Vidal himself wrote 140 pages of accompanying text. However, Ackermann took certain liberties: his engravers altered some details and many pages of the text were altered. It has been described as "The most famous of the costumbrista travel books of the Rio de la Plata region". Maggs Bros said it was "The best authority for the Life and Customs of the River Plate countries at the beginning of the nineteenth century". Bonifacio del Carril went so far as to say "It was, without doubt, the most important book published on Argentina in the nineteenth century".
For a long time his Brazilian watercolours were thought to be lost but a number were found to be in the possession of Vidal's descendants and acquired by an Argentine collector. Picturesque Illustrations of Rio de Janeiro was published by Librería l'Amateur, Buenos Aires in 1961, with an introduction by two members of the Brazilian Historic and Geographic Institute, the watercolours being reproduced by the au pochoir handcraft process. In 2019 a mint condition copy was being offered for sale for $1,000.
The watercolours used by Ackermann were acquired by the Argentine scientist and polymath Francisco P. Moreno. The Argentine collector Alejo González Garaño bought these from Moreno's heirs and made it his purpose to acquire the others. Towards the end of his life he wrote: "Seventy are the original watercolours of Vidal, that form the most precious part of my collection of graphic records pertaining to our country; I have the satisfaction of having reunited and saved these from an inevitable dispersion and destruction." However he died and his collection was dispersed in 1949.
It was Vidal's practice to sign and date his watercolours and from those that are known it can be inferred that he was fairly productive and that he gave many away. How many have survived, but are undiscovered, is unknown.