Curious Colorist of Customs.

• Author: Bach, Caleb

With a keen eye for detail, nineteenth-century Bolivian artist Melchor Maria Mercado recorded the popular traditions, landscapes, and political mood of the early republic

During the nineteenth century, itinerant artists, called costumbristas, documented post-independence life throughout much of Latin America. The Frenchmen Alcides Dessalines d'Orbigny and Jean-Baptiste Debret (cousin of neoclassicist painter Jacques-Louis David) provided the initial impetus for this new kind of social observation, but soon homegrown artists took up brash and pen to follow their lead. In contrast to the Old World traveler-painters who, through Eurocentric eyes, perceived the new continent as remote, exotic, and idyllic, the later generation of costumbristas filtered daily events, local traditions, and styles of dress through more egalitarian sensibilities. They studied things repeatedly, from close range, and with greater objectivity. Such an artist was Melchor Maria Mercado, who for some three decades rendered over one hundred watercolors in painstaking and often chaining detail. As a valuable record of life in the young republic, today Mercado's collection resides in the Archivo Nacional de Bolivia in Sucre.

Born in 1816, Mercado grew up in Sucre when it was still called Chuquisaca and served as administrative center for the Audiencia de Charcas (Alto Peru). Seven years earlier, the cry for independence in La Paz had ignited throughout Alto Peru a series of rebellions against Spanish domination, but coincidentally the actual year of Mercado's birth marked the nadir of the struggle regionally, after which the principal action shifted elsewhere. Thus, in a relatively quiescent setting, young Mercado enjoyed the privileges of life as a member of a middle-class criollo family. His lawyer father was of Spanish descent, as was his mother. At a time when only 10 percent of children in Andean communities attended school, Mercado prospered from enrollment in a remarkably progressive school that employed a pedagogical method called mutual teaching (in which more advanced students taught those less proficient), a concept its English founder, Joseph Lancaster, had introduced to the region, with the support of Simon Bolivar.

Mercado's early schooling, with its do-it-yourself approach to learning, became the basis for a hungry-to-know attitude that flavored his entire life. Equally significant were his years at Colegio Junin, the first secondary school in his hometown, established in 1826 by Antonio Jose de Sucre, Bolivia's first president. There, Mercado learned about the natural sciences as well as music, drawing, and painting. All became lifelong passions. As a youth, Mercado saw the reform-minded liberator in person during a visit to the city destined to bear his name, which moved him to paint an homage to the national hero.

Caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the times, the idealistic Mercado was to have his life dramatically changed by his political activism. Following his father's example, he studied law, but spent eight years in school due to a peculiar kind of harassment described as de la jaula al aula y del aula a la jaula. (Often jailed for their opposing views, students, under guard escort, would shuttle back and forth between their cells and classroom to complete course work and take examinations.) Apparently, Mercado did this sort of jail time but, given the rough-and-tumble nature of Bolivian politics, he also was exiled to the Beni region of eastern Bolivia when, in 1841, General Jose Ballivian overthrew President Jose Miguel de Velasco. Mercado was an ardent follower of Velasco, whom often he described as the Washington of Bolivia.

Politics aside, Mercado found lowland Bolivia...