Guillaume Edouard Marie Dubufe
Guillaume Edouard Marie Dubufe was born in Paris into a family of painters, sculptors and musicians. Dubufe was trained as a sculptor, illustrator and painter and gravitated to elegant romantic paintings. Many of his paintings were large-scale murals, most famously a ceiling at the Paris City Hall in 1891, the hall of the Elysee Palace in 1894 and the Library of the Sorbonne in 1894. After Dubufe died at sea off of Buenos Aires, Argentina, his friend, sculptor Paul-Albert Bartholome (1848-1928) was commissioned to craft his tomb, which was unveiled in 1912.
Serra’s arrival in Mexico was remarkable for the fact that he insisted on walking from the port at Vera Cruz to Mexico City. Venezuela Map In the 1750s, Serra worked at various jobs in and around the colonial capital. The expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767, and especially their arrest and removal from Baja California, landed the Franciscan Serra an appointment as head of the new missions.
Serra managed the religious aspects of the colonization of Alta California (the presentstate of California), while Captain Gaspar de Portol attended to more secular and military matters. Even in the late eighteenth century, Europeans had little understanding of the geography of the interior of North Country. As such, England, Spain, Holland, and Russia all maintained claims to the continent’s Pacific coast. Of these nations, Russia posed the most immediate and serious threat to Spanish expansion in the region. In the late 1760s, Serra’s Franciscans and Portol’s soldiers and sailors struck out to the north in an effort to gain native converts and stop Russian encroachment.
