Rafael Troya

(b Caranqui-Imbabura, 25 Oct 1845; d Ibarra, 15 March 1920). Ecuadorean painter. He was self-taught as an artist. Between 1870 and 1874 he was appointed as the sole illustrator to a team of German scientists, including the naturalist Wilhelm Reiss and the geologist Alfons St?bel, who undertook volcanic surveys in Ecuador. St?bel trained him to make scientific oil paintings of landscapes in situ, emphasizing the details of flora and the exact location of mountains and rivers. A few of the 66 works executed during these years are in the St?dtische Reiss-Museum, Mannheim. This scientific vision of the Andean landscape, combined with the freedom of the contemporary Romanticism, created a personal style that changed little and made him one of the most important 19th-century landscape painters in Latin America. His scientific paintings served as models for such later works as the Eastern Mountain Range from Tiopullo (1874; Quito, Banco Cent. del Ecuador) and the Deer Hunt (1918; Guayaquil, Mus. Antropol. & Mus. A. Banco Cent. del Ecuador). Troya executed portraits of notable Ecuadorean society figures, including the politician and historian Pedro Moncayo Esparza (before 1904; Ibarra, Bib. Mun.), and continued to receive commissions from the Church (e.g. Twelve Apostles, c. 1912; Ibarra, Metropolitana Cathedral).