A newly identified Brazilian painting by Robert Dampier

This article presents a newly discovered oil painting by the little-known British artist Robert Dampier (1800–74), depicting the Sugarloaf Mountain with two enslaved men in Rio de Janeiro, painted in the mid-1820s. The painting, in the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP), was previously at tributed to Henry Chamberlain and Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, but the evidence for its really being by Dampier is affirmed using primary sources (including original drawings by Dampier in his descendants’ ownership) and visual com parison with the artist’s other known works. A second painting in the Geyer collection in Rio is also attributed to Dampier for the first time. With the attri bution to Dampier confirmed, the MASP picture is compared with other works by the British travelling artists. Lastly, with the artist’s clear interest in the tro pical landscape in mind, the article considers the importance of landscape in his best-known works, four portraits painted in Hawaii in 1825.