Carlos Nebel

(Hamburg, 1802 – Paris, 1855)

Indias de la Sierra (Indigenous Women from the Sierra)

n.d.

hand-coloured lithograph (45/150)

32 x 42 cm

Inv. no. CBB294

BBVA Collection Mexico



In the early nineteenth century, many foreign artists were dispatched on scientific missions to Mexico to document the natural wealth and the incredible archaeological and cultural heritage of a nation that had just achieved independence. Using a quick and relatively inexpensive printing method, the work of Frederick Waldeck (1766-1875), Pietro Gualdi (1808-1857), Johann Moritz Rugendas (1802-1858), Daniel Thomas Egerton (1797-1842) and Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854) circulated widely in Mexico and outside the country. Their accounts of daily life and descriptions of social hierarchies and types favoured the first emergence of genre painting. With their passionate depictions of their surrounding environs, these romantic printers also contributed to revitalising landscape as a genre.

Carl Nebel was one of those so-called “travelling artists” whose testimony helped to increase knowledge about Mexico throughout the Western world. His earlier field trip to Mexico from 1829 to 1834, led to a body of work consisting of fifty lithographs, made and hand-coloured at the print shop of Joseph Lemercier (1803-1887), for the portfolio Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dans la partie la plus intéressante du Méxique, published in Paris in 1836 with an introduction by Alexander von Humboldt.

All evidence suggests that Indigenous Women from the Sierra belonged to that portfolio. The passing of time has not tarnished its pleasing charm, though its purported impartiality may well be questioned today.