Cándido López was trained as a painter in Buenos Aires. Shortly after the start of the Triple Alliance War (1864-1870), in which Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay opposed Paraguay, he joined the Argentine army as a volunteer soldier. In his sketchbooks, as if he had been a war chronicler, he recorded different moments of the campaign, which later got transferred to paintings.
The series of works on the War of the Triple Alliance painted by Cándido López was donated by the artist's descendants to the National Museum of Fine Arts of Argentina in the 1960s.
The Curupayti Trench (1893) by Lopez CandidoMuseo Nacional de Bellas Artes de Argentina
In this canvas, Cándido López shows the camp of the Paraguayan army during the battle of Curupaytí. The trench is depicted as seen from the inside using the high point of view, with the Paraguayan soldiers in full defense of the place against the advance of the allies, at a disadvantage before a well-covered army. According to what Cándido López wrote in his notebooks, four thousand soldiers of the allied army died in the battle, and less than one hundred casualties were registered in the Paraguayan army.
It was during that episode of the war that the painter was wounded in his right hand. He was operated without success and, in consequence, he lost a hand and part of the arm. Back in Buenos Aires, he trained his left hand in order to finish the series of paintings on the war, based on the sketches he had made in its first year, witnessing the events from the battlefield.
Curupaytí was a high, undulating ravine, the right margin of which leaned on the Paraguay river and the left one on the Mendes lagoon, surrounded by forests. The site was manned by five thousand Paraguayan soldiers; a moat was opened in front, converting it into an impregnable wall. Soldiers would place there cannons pointed in different directions.
In front of the moat, thorny trunks abounded, used as abatis to prevent the passage of the allied army.
Trees with broken branches and a few wounded on the Paraguayan side contrast with incessant bursts of cannonballs ready to strike the field of the allied army, strewn with dead bodies and wounded soldiers. The combatants who point their weapons and run find it very difficult to access the fortress and attack the Paraguayan army directly.
Cándido López applies the atmospheric perspective to show the allied soldiers in the distance, behind the trench. In these figures, he uses light colors with the intention of showing the distance and the vastness of the battlefield. The smoke produced by the explosions also contributes to blurring the combatants' actions and strengthens the sensation of distance.
