Hidden in the margins: the overlooked artists of 19th-century travel illustrations

Nineteenth-century travelogues significantly influenced how European audiences perceived distant colonial territories, their landscapes, and the peoples inhabiting them. While textual information was important, illustrations complemented the physical descriptions and helped readers visualise what explorers observed with their own eyes while in the field. Yet, the artists behind these images – the drafting technicians, illustrators, engravers, lithographers, colourists, and engravers – have remained largely invisible in the historiography of science. In many of the travelogues, their names are not credited, and the only vestiges of their presence are often difficult-to-read signatures on the margins of the illustrations. In this article, we investigate the artists behind the illustrations of both travelogues published by Hermenegildo Capelo and Roberto Ivens after their expeditions to Angola (1877–1880 and 1884–1885) and reflect on how their work was fundamental to the visual culture of 19th-century colonial science. Rather than treating the plates as neutral decoration, we reconstruct the production network that turned field sketches, photographs, and travellers’ descriptions into printed engravings, and we show how this visual labour shaped what could be stabilised as ‘knowledge’ about Angola in the metropolitan public sphere. Because the largest share of the corpus depicts people, social practices, and material culture, our interpretive intervention concentrates on these ‘social’ plates, reading them against the expeditions’ institutional setting in the Lisbon Geographical Society and scholarship on travel writing, and the making of ethnographic ‘types’.