(1824–1875) Circle View of the Atacama Desert in Chile with the Licancabur Volcano in the background, oil on canvas, 59 x 79 cm, framed, (Rei)

We are grateful to Dr Christine Embleton-Hamann of the Geographical Institute at the University of Vienna, and Dr Augustat, the Museum of Ethnology, Vienna, for their assistance in cataloguing this work. It is likely that the dark-red macaws in the painting are a fantasy of the painter’s for they are inhabitants of the rain forests east of the Andes. However, Selleny may have been inspired by the flamingos in the Atacama. We are grateful to Dr Anita Gamauf of Vienna’s Natural History Museum for her zoological assistance. The Atacama desert is regarded as the world’s driest desert. It lies in South America, in northern Chile, bordering the Pacific to the west, Peru to the north, and Bolivia and Argentina to the east. From 1857 to 1859 Josef Selleny took part on the Novara expedition, the Austrian navy’s first expedition to sail around the world, which brought him to Chile. He brought back with him around 2,000 sketches, studies and drafts from his travels although the inventory taken after his death included only around 946 items. Popelka writes in his book that Selleny intended painting a cycle of 12 paintings entitled “Character Sketches of the World“ which, however, was never realised, the consequence of a result of lack of commissions and funds. Only a few of his sketches were turned into small oil paintings (Liselotte Popelka, Ein österreichischer Maler segelt um die Welt, Joseph Selleny und seine Aquarelle von der Weltreise der Novara 1857–1859, Graz-Cologne, 1964, p. 60.).