The Haciendas of Mexico: An Artist’s Record is Paul Alexander Bartlett’s documentary portrait of the great estates that once dominated the Mexican countryside. Over many years Bartlett visited and drew hundreds of haciendas, recording their houses, chapels, courtyards, and outbuildings, many of them already falling into ruin after the upheavals of the Mexican Revolution.
The book preserves a vanishing architectural and social world, combining the artist’s eye with historical observation about the rise and decline of the hacienda system. Bartlett treats these estates as both buildings and emblems of a way of life. For readers interested in Mexican history, vernacular architecture, and the documentation of endangered heritage, it offers a moving and carefully observed record.