A panoramic view of Rio de Janeiro looking across Guanabara Bay from Icaraí beach, Niterói, with fishermen before the Itapuca rock

The young Ferdinand Keller, a German artist from Karlsruhe, travelled to Brazil with his brother Franz and father Joseph in 1856. Franz, with whom he worked closely, married the daughter of photographer George Leuzinger in Brazil and assumed the name Franz Keller-Leuzinger. Ferdinand returned to Germany in 1862 before his brother and father made their expeditions into the interior, to the Parana in 1865-66 and to the Amazon in 1868. Ferdinand worked up his and his brother's Brazilian views into large canvases in Germany. His larger but remarkably similar Vista do Rio de Janeiro (1873), taken from a little further back on the same beach at Niterói and sharing the same palette as the present canvas, was acquired by the late Jean Boghici in the 1990s (for which see the exhibition catalogue O Olhar Distante (Mostra do Redescobrimento, Brasil 500 é mais), Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Sao Paulo, 2000, p.221). Keller pursued a successful career as a landscape, history and portrait artist, his most well known early work 'Alexander von Humboldt on the Orinoco' (1862) acknowledging he was familiar with and was probably inspired by the work of the German scientist and traveller who encouraged so many German artists to paint in Latin America.