Artists in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Brazil

The drawings and paintings created in the colony of Dutch Brazil (1630–1654) represent the global reach of Dutch-sponsored artistic production in the seventeenth century. Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (b. 1604–d. 1679) was a German count, a cousin of Dutch Stadholder Frederick Hendrick, and Dutch Brazil’s only colonial governor. He arrived in northeastern Brazil (present-day Recife) in 1637; by 1640 his retinue likely included up to three professional painters from the Netherlands: Frans Post (b. 1612–d. 1680) of Haarlem, Albert Eckhout (b. c. 1607–d. c. 1666) of Groningen, and the little-known Utrecht artist Abraham Willaerts (b. c. 1613–d. 1669). They were joined in Brazil by Dutch physician Willem Piso (b. 1611–d. 1678) and German natural historian Georg Marggrafe (b. 1610–d. 1644). During their time in Brazil, these men studied the human population, the plants and animals, the topography, and even the constellations of the South American colony. Together, they created the first written and visual record by Europeans of their interaction with Brazil. Post is known for his landscapes of Brazil, some produced in situ, and others that became the staple of his post-Brazilian career. Topographical drawings and a series of natural history studies may also be attributed to the artist. Engravings after his designs also appeared in Dutch humanist Caspar Barlaeus’s 1647 history of Dutch Brazil, Rerum per octennium in Brasilia. Eckhout’s Brazilian oeuvre includes life-sized images, often called ethnographic portraits, of the men and women of the colony (excluding Europeans); paintings of fruits and vegetables grown in Brazil; and a large corpus of drawings and oil studies on paper. Many of the latter were used for woodcuts in Marggrafe and Piso’s 1648 Historia Naturalis Brasiliae. Later European work by Eckhout included tapestry cartoons and Brazilian-inspired ceiling paintings. Willaerts was a marine specialist whose oeuvre includes a recently identified View of Recife from 1640. While Piso was not artistically inclined, Marggrave created maps, and multiple watercolors of Brazilian flora and fauna have also been attributed to him. The German quartermaster Zacharias Wagener was not part of the governor’s official retinue, nor was he a trained artist. Nonetheless, his Thierbuch copied and interpreted works by the colony’s official artists. Piso, Marggrafe, Eckhout, Post, and possibly Willaerts were not leading artists or scientists in the Dutch Republic when they were chosen for this remarkable experience. They had training, but more importantly, they were young, unwed, and likely interested in traveling to the New World as a means of making a name for themselves.