page_title: Emeric Essex Vidal
section_title: "Mode of Lazoing Cattle in Buenos Ayres"
hierarchical_section_title: Emeric Essex Vidal / Work / Second South American tour / "Mode of Lazoing Cattle in Buenos Ayres"
caption_attribution_description: English: Two gauchos are lassoing a bull in Buenos Aires province. This enormous (122 x 185 inches) watercolour by Emeric Essex Vidal was dedicated by him to Lady Ponsonby, wife of the British ambassador.
context_page_description: Emeric Essex Vidal 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.
context_section_description: Vidal dedicated this huge (122 x 185 inches) watercolour to Lady Ponsonby, wife of the British ambassador to Buenos Aires.
caption: Mode of Lazoing Cattle in Buenos Ayres, Drawn for the Lady P.[onsonby], 1829.   Gauchos could lasso any part of an animal and their aim was unerring.  Once lassoed in two places their horses knew to run in opposite directions to jerk the ropes tight.  One man would dismount — his horse spontaneously keeping the rope tight — and despatch the victim with his facón.  Even a jaguar could be killed by this method.
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