Lot 87: Anton Goering (1836-1905) , Vista de Puerto Cabello

watercolor on paper signed lower right

measurements 15 by 24 3/4 in. alternate measurements (38.1 by 62.8 cm)

Alfredo Behrens, Caracas

Executed circa 1867.
Anton Goering is one of the many European scientists that explored South America in the footsteps of the German Alexander von Humboldt. Having trained in his youth as a taxidermist and later as an artist in the Academy of Leipzig, by the age of twenty-two Goering had already visited Argentina and Uruguay. He was later involved with the Zoological Society of London and at the age of thirty disembarked in Venezuela with the principal task of identifying and gathering specimens of the local flora and fauna for The British Museum. Following his travels to Carupano in the east and his explorations of the Guácharo caves, previously visited by Humboldt and fellow artist Ferdinand Bellermann, Goering soon arrived in Puerto Cabello, the main port in the Venezuelan central coast. It was there that he befriended the German trader Federico Blohm and his family who would provide Goering with a base for his inland expeditions. Between 1866 and 1874 Goering made dozens of watercolors that reflected quite romantically, and at times dramatically, the Venezuelan landscapes of the western Andes, the Maracaibo lake region, the Llanos, and the Oriente. This view of Puerto Cabello, certainly one of the largest and finest watercolors he ever produced, depicts the peninsula that protects the bay in the North. The vastness of the sea and terrain are also punctuated by very detailed elements that require the viewer?s careful observation: a fisherman on a canoe, a flock of resting pelicans, a steamer leaving port, all painted against the backdrop of the Fortín San Felipe to the right and the massive customs house and church towers on the left.