This research is focused on the novel Un episodio en la vida del pintor viajero (An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter), by César Aira, one of the greatest contemporary Argentine writers. In this novel published in 2000, and translated to french in 2001, Aira relates Johan Moritz Rugendas'first trip to Argentina. Rugendas was a German romantic painter of the first part of the nineteenth century who travelled throughout Latin America during twenty years and made thousands of paintings and drawings. Inspired from Alexander von Humboldt's theories, and more precisely from "the physiognomy of nature", Rugendas was also a naturalist artist and his art could help science. In 1838, he crossed the Andes and the Argentinian pampa with another painter, Robert Krause, but he suffered a fall horse before arriving to San Luis. During the return trip to Chile, he is said to have approached the Indians near Mendoza. This episode of Rugendas' life is the one Aira relates, his own way. The first part of this thesis aims to deeply analyze the novel, through its different themes. Among them are the links between art and travel, writing and painting, art and science, the perception of beauty and ugliness. This trip made of pain and discoveries turns out to be a real initiatory journey for the artist. In the second part, I adopt an historical point of view, comparing the novel with the events related in biographies of Rugendas and in contemporary accounts, and reflecting about the dialectic between fiction and reality. All this leads me to think about the activity of traveller painter, in the third part. I first reconstitute the trip route of the two artists, drawing a parallel between the paintings of Rugendas and the narration of Krause, then I consider each characteristic of the occupation of traveller painter through the experience of these artists and other painters who travelled through Latin America in the nineteenth century, such as Léon Pallière, Auguste Borget or Raymond Monvoisin for instance, and the painters inspired from Humboldt's theories. This thesis, which deals with literature, history of art and aesthetics, is an interdisciplinary research.
