As landscape painting came to be inscribed in the discourses of autonomous art in Ecuador and other regions of South America, images of natural scenery took on different meanings in the formation of national aesthetics. Luis A. Martínez’s Paisaje demonstrates the nationalistic undertones of landscape painting at this time, when land came to be perceived as the very foundation of emerging nations throughout the Americas. A chromatic array of blues and greens characterizes Paisaje, in which a clouded, mountainous landscape unfolds in all directions.