Escuela gratuita de dibujo del Consulado de Buenos Aires (1799-1823)
A free drawing school costing twenty pesos a month, opened by the merchant guild of Buenos Aires in March 1799 and refused royal funding a year later because the Crown had graver urgencies. It was revived in 1815 by a friar whose printed sermon paid for it, taught at night to a hall of two hundred, and ended as the preparatory drawing class of the university.
Why this wins its question: The usual account of art teaching in the Río de la Plata begins with the republican academies of the 1820s and treats the colonial period as a blank. This object dates the free drawing school to the consular minute of 15 March 1799, prices it at twenty pesos a month, and quotes the royal resolution of 4 April 1800 that praised the guild's zeal and refused the expense — the whole institutional decision in the Crown's own sentence. It then follows the revival of 1815 through a friar's printed sermon that raised 580 pesos, a borrowed set of engravings, a night class of two hundred, and that same friar's letter blaming his own side for closing the schools the exiled Spaniards had kept flourishing.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The secretary of the Consulado encouraged Juan Antonio Hernández to petition the guild for protection to found a "Escuela de geometría, perspectiva y de toda clase de dibujo". The corporation authorized it — "aunque con repugnancia manifiesta por no estar debidamente autorizada para hacer esta clase de erogaciones" — and by the minute of 15 March 1799 the budget came to two hundred and eighty-one pesos four reales of establishment costs and twenty pesos monthly, the director's emoluments remaining at his own charge. The approval carried the express condition of reporting the creation to the Court, and the school was in place in March 1799 with the viceroy's approval.
The Crown's answer is quoted in the same chapter from the royal resolution registered in the Cedulario: informed by the Consulado's representation that it had adopted Hernández's idea of erecting a free school of geometry, perspective, architecture and every kind of drawing, "en atención á la necesidad que hay en esa Capital de la enseñanza de estas artes", the King replied that although he valued the body's zeal, it was his royal will that it bear in mind "las graves urgencias del Estado para excusar todo gasto durante ellas". Signed Soler, Aranjuez, 4 April 1800.
The two statements of the same sum do not agree, and both are printed here as found: the narrative, from the consular minute, gives two hundred and eighty-one pesos four reales of establishment costs, while the royal resolution quoted in the chapter's own footnote gives 181 ps. 4 rs. The monthly figure of twenty pesos is the same in both.
The Court neither approved the creation nor authorized its future support, and the school had to close after three years of existence, to the deep grief of the man who had begun it. The historian records that nothing is known either of the person of its first director or of the fruits it gave in those three years.
The foundation date is contested in the literature the source itself cites: Manuel Moreno, in the Vida y memorias of his brother Mariano, placed the establishment in 1796, which Gutiérrez reports as an error rectified by Mitre from the original records of the consular sessions.
Nothing more was said of a drawing school in Buenos Aires until 1815, when in January Fray Francisco de Paula Castañeda erected two small drawing academies in the convent of the Recolección. The Cabildo, learning of it, agreed with the Consular Tribunal, and in the Tribunal's own house a hall capable of holding two hundred pupils was made over to him; the school — the first established in Buenos Aires with any formality and sufficient resources — was to open to the public on 10 August 1815.
The school was paid for by a printed sermon. Castañeda solemnized the opening with a discourse that ran in print and produced 580 pesos collected among the patriots who received copies of it, a sum the author donated to the Consulado for the same creation. His own letter to the guild confirms the figure and adds that he had offered it a further two hundred pesos a year for life.
The resources were so poor that the masters served without pay, and the models had to be borrowed: Castañeda wrote that they had been lent the famous collection of engravings, the only one in the city, which had been destined for Chile, to which all the drawing cartillas that had been in Buenos Aires had already been sent.
The consular school was nocturnal and much frequented, under the direction of the French engraver José Rousseau with a son of the country, Aldama, as his assistant. The teaching method is judged a failure by the same source: it was reduced to copying engraved or lithographed human heads in pencil, a method followed for many years that spoiled the efforts made to spread drawing either as a base of the fine arts and the mechanical trades or as an auxiliary of the careers related to the mathematical sciences.
In the middle of January each year the consular corporation invited the public to come and examine the progress of the drawing class, whose most advanced pupils exhibited work in the school's own hall.
The school was interrupted by the social disturbances of 1820; the Consulado pleaded want of funds of its own to pay the masters, on which Castañeda published serious threats against the corporation in his paper. The Consulado nevertheless made an effort and reopened the school on 25 October 1820 under Rousseau, announcing it to the public in the Gaceta; the pupils enrolled on that occasion reached a hundred.
Castañeda's letter to the prior and consuls is the counterpoint from inside the patriot side. He complains that the two hundred pesos a year he had offered would be lost through "una de las muchas etiquetas simples que hemos heredado de los españoles" — his acceptance of the chaplaincy of the jail without his provincial's leave — and describes himself as guardian suspended, regent of studies without classrooms, lector without a single pupil. He then writes that the European friars exiled to the valley of Catamarca at the request of the patriot friars had erected schools and kept them flourishing, "y nosotros empeñados en perseguirnos unos a otros hemos acabado ya con las que teníamos".
The same letter states the school's first result in numbers and in hope: eighteen young men made capable in six months, whom he hands over as "una primicia y diezmo anticipado de los diez y ocho mil jóvenes dibujantes que espero presentar a la Patria antes de concluir mi peregrinación sobre la tierra".
A further school was founded in the Colegio de la Unión in May 1823, in the largest teaching room of the old Jesuit building, under the Swede José Guth; it kept Rousseau's system, so that an entire school year went in copying a single head from an engraving. Donations from the public, including General Pueyrredón and Governor Rodríguez, reached 1,950 pesos fuertes against costs reckoned at 559 pesos. From then on the school formed part of the preparatory studies given at the state's expense in the university.