In her engaging book, Ana Lucia Araujo guides us through the Brazilian journey in 1858 of French painter and illustrator François-Auguste Biard. Biard was one of several French artists who travelled to Brazil to study and represent the exotic life in the tropics in eighteenth and nineteenth century. The author draws most of her sources from the travelogue Deux années au Brésil (‘Two Years in Brazil’), the 680-page book by French illustrator Édouard Riou, which includes 180 woodcuts reproducing Biard's originals. Araujo places Biard's work within the notion of tropical romanticism, a vision that, ‘through an extensive corpus of visual and written representations of the natural environment and of its populations of color’ conveyed an ambiguous image of Brazil in Europe (Chapter 2). This view generally consists of the imagery of Brazil as a seductive place composed of tropical wilderness and racially-diverse populations, but also as a dangerous and backward reality. Araujo argues that tropical romanticism helped French travellers to understand a society that was organised very differently from the European model. The experience of French artists in Brazil, however, also reinforced the travellers’ feelings about European and white superiority. The views conveyed by French painters in Brazil have contributed to the production of certain images of the country, racialised imageries that, to some extent, still exist today.

While Araujo frames Biard's experience within the general trend of French artists’ approach to Brazil at that time, she also finds that Deux années au Brésil reveals aspects that were relatively peculiar to Biard. Something interesting, for example, is that Biard often appears at the centre of his own ethnographic descriptions and woodcut representations. This style allows the reader to grasp information about the personality of the artist and his response to Brazil as a white European. The painter's personality emerging from the travelogue is disturbing in many regards. As Araujo observes, Biard is somewhat uncritical of slavery and shows little compassion for the social inequalities existing between whites and non-whites, at least to a lesser extent than other European travellers such as Darwin, Debret, Graham and Manet. In general, Biard's travelogue projects an explicitly negative representation of Amerindians and black people, who are often described as lazy, untrustworthy, underdeveloped, ugly and irrational (Chapters 3, 4 and 5), although the author's satirical comments address all colour groups without exception (p. 72). In general, Biard built his accounts in ways that set out his bravery in coping with the tropics, an environment in which Amerindians and Afro-descendants appear as features of a hostile environment that should be ‘tamed’ (p. 104). A longing for challenge and exotic adventure, not surprisingly, emerges as a crucial motivation for Biard's journey to Brazil. While Araujo is quite critical of these points altogether, she also shows appreciation for the innovative style of the artist and for some aspects of his social understanding of the local reality. As she acknowledges, the use of satire had been rather unusual in travelogues at that time. Biard's satire and political incorrectness should be appreciated, particularly, by considering that links of patronage with the Brazilian elite restricted artists’ chances to express their views on Brazil freely (p. 96).

This book has several merits. Above all, it unveils the work and personality of a little-known French artist and his ‘European’ understanding of Brazil. Foreign interpretations of Brazil became very influential in the construction of Brazilian identity from the mid 1850s onwards. Official discourse in the late Imperial times and during the First Republic, for instance, emphasised how Brazil could ever overcome its sense of racial inferiority through whitening and mixture. While the ideology of racial mixture and racial democracy that emerged in the 1930s with the work of Gilberto Freyre tried to overturn this complex of racial inferiority, the feeling is that the Portuguese man described by Freyre has still something in common with Biard's character, particularly in relation to his ‘ability’ to extract native and African ‘subordinate’ knowledge in order to ‘succeed’ in the tropics. Interestingly, the ethno-racialised stereotypes projected by Biard continue to affect Amerindians and Afro-Brazilians in Brazil's thriving racial democracy today.

This book makes for an enjoyable read. Importantly, it contributes to historicising race and national identity in Brazil in their dialectic relation to European ideals. The usefulness of this piece of work, however, goes far beyond this analysis. As a foreign researcher interested in Brazil, for example, I found that Brazil through the French Eyes opens crucial questions about the reasons that move foreigners to investigate Latin America and about their power in the representation of the subject studied. How much have these power relations been subverted since the nineteenth century? An aspect that gave me pause for thought after reading this book is the gender disparity among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European travellers in Latin America. To what extent was Biard's understanding of the Brazilian reality influenced by his gender? My thoughts, in this context, go back to Mary Graham's compassionate account of Brazilian slavery, which stands in stark contrast to Biard's racist, insensitive and egocentric narrative. Something that perhaps could be considered for a future edition of the book is the addition of more references to contemporary race relations in Brazil and their international intersections, as I believe that this would extend its readership among researchers in the Social Sciences.