Emilio B. Coutaret. Artist and multifaceted cultural agent

Abstract

This paper examines the works that the French artist Emilio Bonnet Coutaret (1863-1949) created for the Museo de La Plata (MLP) in 1922. It begins with a brief overview of his career as an artist, teacher and cultural manager, and then moves on to characterize and interpret his paintings. Coutaret painted two large murals in the Museum's rotundas: a riverside landscape in the rotunda on the upper floor and a representation of Pampas prehistoric fauna in the Entrance Hall. These paintings occupied two spaces that had been left vacant due to the extreme deterioration of the previously existing murals painted by artists Reinaldo Giudici and Luis De Servi during the founding period of MLP, between 1886 and 1888. Emilio Coutaret had been Head of the Drawing School that operated in the Museo between 1908 and 1921, so he knew both MLP and its then director, Dr. Luis María Torres, very well. It may be assumed that both the making of the murals and its themes were direct commissions from Torres. Finally, the murals have a naturalistic and detailed finish, and it is possible that the artist made them from sketches taken in situ. These characteristics add verisimilitude to these works, a quality they share with the other murals distributed in the central space of the MLP.