(b Morges, Vaud, 3 March 1814; d Melbourne, Victoria, 30 May 1888). Swiss painter, lithographer and photographer, active in Brazil and Australia. He attended a drawing school in Lausanne, where his teacher may have been Marc-Louis Arlaud (1772–1845), and is thought to have spent some time with the landscape painter Camille Flers in Paris c. 1836 en route to Bahia (Salvador), Brazil. In 1840 he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he established himself as a painter of local views and exhibited with the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, Rio. His Brazilian landscapes, of which the View of Gamboa (1852; Rio de Janeiro, Mus. N. B.A.) is an example, received critical acclaim for their vivacious lighting. As a photographer he fulfilled commissions in daguerreotype for Emperor Peter II, and with the figure painter Auguste Moreau he produced a set of 18 lithographs, Picturesque Rio de Janeiro, published in 1843–4. From 1852 to 1864 he worked as a portrait photographer in Switzerland and from 1855 to 1864 as a teacher of art in La Chaux de Fonds, Neuchâtel, associating and exhibiting his landscapes with the Swiss followers of Corot. In 1865 Buvelot settled in Melbourne, Victoria, and worked for a year as a portrait photographer. From 1866 to c. 1884, painting both in oils and watercolours, he depicted sunny and peaceful landscapes, creating images of the countryside that were familiar and domesticated, as in St Kilda Park (c. 1878; Adelaide, A.G. S. Australia). His manner was identified as French because of its relative freedom of touch. He was accorded the highest respect by Australian patrons and critics and by younger artists, in particular those of the Heidelberg school.

• Buvelot, Abram-Louis
  • Australia, §III, 1(ii): Painting and graphic arts, before c 1900
  • Brazil, §V, 2(i): Painting, graphic arts and sculpture, c 1822–88