Por allí pasó Rondé

Philippe Rondé (1815-1883), of Dutch nationality by his parents who were originally from Luxembourg, was born in Trier (now in Germany), trained as a painter in Paris and traveled from 1849 to 1851 in the Mexican Republic. He had been hired by a French investor who wanted to found a colony near Corralitos, in the northern state of Chihuahua, to draw landscapes and represent the industry and daily life of those places. But the enormous graphic collection, of about half a thousand representations that Rondé bequeathed is more varied: it includes many visits of the city of Chihuahua that have an unquestionable historical value, also includes several points of the road between Chihuahua and Mexico City and some more places in the central highlands. The whole of the work, analyzed in a serial manner, is a faithful reflection of the ideas of Europeans about Mexico in the mid-nineteenth century and is influenced by the artistic currents of the Neo-Gothic and Orientalism.