A Merry Company on the Banks of the Rímac River

ca.1800

This painting from colonial Peru depicts the grounds of a country estate populated by privileged, peninsular Spaniards (people born in Spain) and members of the Creole elite (people of Spanish descent born in the Americas). They are accompanied by the Indigenous and African servants who dress, serve, and entertain them, thereby making the aristocrats’ leisure time possible. The unidentified artist completed this work in Lima, which was the capital of the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru until that country gained its independence in the 1820s. While the white men wear suits fashionable at the time among cosmopolitan Europeans, their wealthy female counterparts dress in the characteristic native South American pollera ensemble, showing how the confluence of Indigenous and Spanish customs contributed to distinctive regional styles.