Colonial Representations of Brazil and their
Current Display in Western Museums
The Mauritshuis Case and the Dutch Gaze
Carolina Monteiro | s2238543 carolpqmonteiro@gmail.com
MA Thesis Arts & Culture | Museums & Collections Leiden University | 2019
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kitty Zijlmans Second reader: Prof. Dr. Marika Keblusek
Acknowledgements
Writing a thesis is, in most cases, a commitment of introspection every researcher does to him/herself as a way to express his/her gratitude for those who provide the world with a magical ingredient of human nature: knowledge. Nonetheless, the words inside an MA work not always express the importance of the contribution we receive from the most incredible people we encounter along the way and who help us move forward as better human beings. My time as a Master’s student of Arts & Culture: Museum and Collections at Leiden University has been unique in many ways. First, it provided me with the intellectual energy to feed this inquisitive mind I carry since 1984. Second and more importantly, it made me cross paths with a number of motivated, inspiring, intelligent and loving people, without whom this journey would have just been blend, if non-existent.
Dutch Brazil only lasted for thirty years, but its legacy continues to stimulate and intrigue those who look for a better understanding of the inequalities of the present, and how to overcome them. Through this MA thesis I had the chance to meet a few people and institutions sharing these same questions, and to whom I would like to thank. I am deeply thankful to the Mauritshuis, for embracing my motivation, supporting my research and having opened its doors for a different way of thinking. It was also at the Mauritshuis, where I had the opportunity to work with exceptionally talented people, such as curator Lea van der Vinde. Her wit, experience and kindness have been the key ingredients for my growth, both as a museum professional, and as a friend. Within the academic world, it was through professor Mariana Françozo’s extensive work on the material culture of Dutch Brazil that got me fascinated with the subject and its yet multiple open questions. Her determination and intellect are my greatest inspirations as a researcher, which I wish to follow and nurture for the next years alongside her research team.
Finally, it has been an honor to share this work with Professor Kitty Zijlmans, my dearest supervisor, always attentive and just on her remarks, be it in life or in Academia. You are one of the most remarkable women I have ever met. Thank you for guiding me through this amazing adventure!
Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
1) POSSESSING BRAZIL 4
1.1) Pindorama and its ‘savages’ 4
1.2) The Dutch gaze 9
1.3) Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen’s tropical court 11
2) VISUALIZING AND MATERIALIZING DUTCH BRAZIL 13
2.1) Naar het leven 13
2.2) Johan Maurits’ Brasiliana as private cultural capital 19
2.3) The collection ‘returns’ to the Mauritshuis 24
3) INTERPRETING DUTCH BRAZIL: FRANS POST 28
3.1) The neglected social aspect in Post’s landscapes 28
3.2) The view of Itamaracá 30
3.3) Itamaracá on display 33
CONCLUSION 37
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 41
BIBLIOGRAPHY 60
Printed primary sources 60
Secondary literature 60
Introduction
From 1630 to 1654 the Dutch West India Company1 succeeded in establishing a colony
in the Northeast part of Brazil, then under the dominance of Portugal.2 Its most
preeminent governor, German count and later prince Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1604-1679), administered the protectorate through slave and sugar trade, and sponsored artists, botanists and scientists to document the native Brazilians and new inhabitants’ daily life and customs. After his return to the Dutch Republic in 1644, Johan Maurits’ engaged in the donation of his collection of Brazilian representations and artefacts (Brasiliana) to important figures of the European elite in exchange for financial gain, nobility titles and professional growth.3
His retinue in Brazil included – among others – painters Frans Post (1612-1680) and Albert Eckhout (c.1607-c.1666), and naturalist Georg Marcgraf (1610-1644), who were in charge of – but not limited to – the portraits, landscapes and cartography of Dutch Brazil, respectively. Together with other important names of Johan Maurits’ court, such as the count’s physician Willem Piso (1611-1678) and the quartermaster Zacharias Wagener (1614-1668), they have all produced an impressive amount of prints, drawings, sketches and paintings about Brazil. Since the nineteenth century, scholars and public institutions have developed a growing interest in these works, especially regarding their historical value.4 These studies have culminated in a
series of publications and exhibitions about the figure of Johan Maurits, more specifically about his government and the artworks produced in and about Dutch Brazil.
Indeed, the role of Johan Maurits as a ‘benefactor of the arts’ has been broadly praised by scholarly research, and his effort in documenting the daily life in the ‘New World’ has been commonly seen as the work of a ‘humanist prince’ in the tropics.5
1 The West India Company (WIC), was a charted enterprise to whom the Dutch Republic granted the
trade between the African Coast and the Americas during seventeenth-century colonial expansion, following its counterpart in Asia the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Johannes Postma, The Dutch
in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1990]), 22-25. 2 Named ‘New Holland’, the new colony was also known as Dutch Brazil and will be referenced as such
throughout this thesis.
3 Mariana Françozo, De Olinda a Holanda: O Gabinete de Curiosidades de Nassau (São Paulo: Editora
UNICAMP, 2014), 19, 202-229.
4 Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Rubro Veio: O Imaginário da Restauração Pernambucana, 3rd ed. (São
Paulo: Alameda, 2008), 61-87. Rebecca Parker Brienen, “Who Owns Frans Post?,” in The Legacy of
Dutch Brazil, ed. Michiel van Groesen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 229-247. 5 Charles Boxer’s memorable work about the Dutch occupation in Brazil has two entire chapters
Nonetheless, I argue that precisely because of this mythification of Dutch Brazil, historiography has failed so far – with a few exceptions – in critically analyzing the representations produced during the Dutch occupation.6 By considering these works
as true masterpieces, only possible because of the effort of a magnificent patron, the relationship between the artist, his commissioner and the object is overlooked. The social and hierarchical interpretations of what is depicted give room to formalist approaches, and the impact of this fruitful production in the imaginary of a European audience is again ignored.
Like the first impressions produced in the sixteenth century that have inevitably bestowed Brazil as the land of cannibals and the bigotry dispensed towards the Amerindians that has underpinned the idea of the ‘good savage’ versus the ‘wild beast,’7 the images produced in the Dutch colony often show a similar patronizing
perspective of the country. Therefore, the initial chapter of this thesis focuses on the arrival of the first Europeans to the land later denominated Brazil and their encounter with the native peoples inhabiting this portion of South America. In the light of seventeenth-century colonial expansion I will investigate the idea of possessing someone else’s territory by judging their values and cultures as a way to justify the means of exploitation. From these first encounters, I will examine how the image of the native Brazilians has been constructed in Europe along the sixteenth century, based on the oral and written narratives of the first Europeans occupying Brazil and from the images produced after such tales. The Dutch arrival in the northeast of Brazil during the seventeenth century will be analyzed as a continuation of Portuguese occupation and as such, it will also be presented along the first chapter. This includes a brief description about the appointment and administration of its most emblematic governor, Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen and the first impressions collected from the encounter of the Dutch and the already established Brazilian society.
Boxer, The Dutch in Brazil, 1624-1654 (Connecticut: Archon Books, 1973 [1958]), 112-158. See also: Ernst van den Boogaart, Hans Hoetink, and Peter J. P. Whitehead, eds., Johan Maurits van
Nassau-Siegen (1604-1679): A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil, Essays on the Occasion of the Tercentenary of his Death (The Hague: The Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979).
6 Contemporary researchers such as Rebecca Parker Brienen, Mariana Françozo, Daniel de Souza Leão
Vieira, Michiel van Groesen, Evaldo Cabral de Mello and Erik Odegard, among others, are presenting a more comprehensive analysis of the period of the Dutch occupation in Brazil and their work is of utmost importance for this thesis.
7 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Indigenous Experiences of Colonization,” in The Brazil Reader: History, Culture, Politics, eds. James N. Green, Victoria Langland, and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, 2nd ed., The World Readers (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019), 28-31.
The second chapter will be focused on the visual and material culture produced and collected in and about Dutch Brazil. It will examine the role of the artists and scientists hired to document the ‘New World’ and their most representative works, as well as some of the depictions produced by other Europeans outside the commission of Johan Maurits. The political and economic differences between the artworks produced under his patronage and the rest of the visual production of Dutch Brazil will be stressed and the understanding of the commissioned items as private capital will be underlined. This will be exposed through the analysis of the display and intentional dispersion of Johan Maurits’ collection, including his commissioned works. The last part of the second chapter will refer to and study some of the items of his Brasiliana and other artworks related to Dutch Brazil that today are part of the collection of the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, a museum established at Johan Maurits’ former residence in The Hague in 1822 in order to host the royal collections of stadtholders William IV (1711-1751) and William V (1748-1806).8
In the last and third chapter the research will be concentrated on the role and œuvre of Frans Post. I will confront the reiterated art historical analysis of his work as mere landscape art with the neglected social aspect present in most of his canvases. Following the subject, I will present a more contextualized analysis of View of Itamaracá Island (1637), the first work attributed to Post made in Brazil (fig. 1). The final part of the third chapter will be destined to investigate this artwork’s trajectory and museological display after its acquisition by the Mauritshuis in 1953.
As an attempt to understand how the works related to Dutch Brazil have been perceived and interpreted throughout the decades, and how the romanticized view of this colonial period is kept alive up to the present date, this thesis is intended as a starting point for a broader subsequent investigation on the subject. This research is also subjected to a number of limitations that need to be acknowledged in advance, such as time and spatial constraints and my restricted knowledge of the Dutch language. Nonetheless, I expect to shed light on the importance of the vast visual production of this colonial period, not by focusing on its historical documentation value, but on its significance as the produce and subject of a Eurocentric perspective of the other.
8 Quentin Buvelot, ed. Mauritshuis: The Building (The Hague: Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen
1. Possessing Brazil
1.1. Pindorama and its ‘savages’
Brazilian history starts from its ‘discovery.’ In 1500, the Portuguese arrived in Bahia and ‘found’ a paradise inhabited by uncivilized people while on route to the Indies, a supposedly accidental deviation as described by Lilia Schwarcz and Heloisa Starling on their latest volume about the country: Brazil.9 The location of this vast land in the
West of the Atlantic brings different consequences for the discoverers and the discovered. For the first ones, it meant profit. The possibility of expanding their power, by producing and extracting goods to compete with other European nations. For the last, however, it was the beginning of a long period of cultural dominance, genocide, mercantilism and the introduction of different costumes, diseases and practices.10 A
third human layer added to the colonial endeavor by the colonizers and thus subjugated to the colonial system, also played an important part in the cultural formation of the country: the more than five million enslaved Africans deported to Brazil from the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century.11
With the invasion of Pindorama12 and the implementation of the colonial
regime, a number of Europeans started to document this ‘New World.’ Its peoples and their habits, its geography and climate, its flora and fauna as well as its resources, were meticulously described and studied under the sixteenth-century ethnocentric religious rule of the occupiers of the recently divided colonial captaincies.13 Descriptions of the
indigenous peoples’ behaviors and traditions were used to categorize and justify European, and in this case, Catholic dominance, as the classification of the ‘other’ oscillated between naïve and pure to wild and uncivilized. The first known written source of this encounter, the letter of Pêro Vaz de Caminha (1450-1500), positions the indigenous as “innocent people,” who, if not for the communication barrier, would “immediately become Christians,” since they do not seem to “understand about any
9 Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Brazil: A Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2018), 09-24.
10 “Conquest and Colonial Rule,” in Green, The Brazil Reader, 7-12.
11 According to an estimate presented by the database Slave Voyages, a total of 5.532.120 African
women, men and children were enslaved and deported to Brazil in slave ships between 1551 and 1875. “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: Estimates,” Slave Voyages, accessed May 29, 2019,
https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates.
12 Pindorama, informally translated as ‘Land of palm trees,’ was the name given to Brazil by the
Andean-Peruvian people inhabiting South America before European invasion.
13 Following the model implemented in the islands of Madeira and Azores, the Portuguese divided the
colony in fourteen hereditary captaincies to be administered by beneficiaries designated by King Manuel I (c.1495-1521). Schwarcz and Starling, Brazil, 12.
faith.”14 At the same time, Portuguese chroniclers along the sixteenth century, have
matured the idea of the uncivilized indigenous, disapproving some of the characteristics of their cultures, such as polygamy, anthropophagy and nudity. All averse to Catholic behavior, these were seen as signs of inferiority and justified European authority. Pero de Magalhães Gândavo (c.1540-c.1580) describes the original peoples of the land as “inhuman and cruel,” who live “like brute animals without order or human concord,”15 while Gabriel Soares de Souza (1540-c.1591)
assumes the “barbarians,” whose life was merely based on living and dying, do not have any knowledge of the truth.16
In order to enlighten the ‘uncivilized’ and expand Catholic faith, the first Jesuit missionaries from the Companhia de Jesus (Society of Jesus) arrived in Brazil in 1549. Under the leadership of Manoel da Nóbrega (1517-1570), the plan was to indoctrinate the ‘savages,’ who were then gathered in villages and converted to Catholicism. According to Schwarcz and Starling, the tension between the missionaries and Portuguese settlers was constant, because of their detrimental divergence regarding the role of the indigenous in the colonial society and their position as free men.17
Concerning the anthropophagy practiced by some groups of native Brazilians, Nóbrega recognizes it as “the most abominable thing among them. If they kill someone at war, they cut him into pieces, braise and eat him, with the same peculiar sobriety; and all of this is done with the cordial hatred they foster against each other.”18 Part of
the indoctrination of the indigenous peoples consisted, therefore, in condemning the act as unchristian and uncivilized, and the acknowledgment of its denial was seen as an emblematic sign of progress. Father José de Anchieta (1534-1597), in a letter to the Society of Jesus, describes the parents of the indigenous children of the Piratininga village as “very different from the indigenous of other villages, since they do not kill nor eat their enemies,”19 thus, seen as more evolved human beings by the colonizers.
14 Pêro Vaz de Caminha, “Letter to King Manuel I of Portugal, May 1, 1500,” in Green, The Brazil Reader,
12-17. Caminha, who was travelling with Pedro Álvares Cabral (1467-1520) to India, intended to take office as a secretary in a trading post in Calcutta. As the fleet ended up in the coast of Brazil, he was instructed to inform the King of Portugal of the fleet’s unintentional finding.
15 Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, “On the Customs of the Indians of the Land,” in Green, The Brazil Reader, 35-37.
16 Gabriel Soares de Sousa, Tratado Descriptivo do Brasil in 1587, ed. Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen,
3rd ed., vol. 117, Brasiliana Series 5 (São Paulo [etc.]: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1938 [1587]), 302. 17 Schwarcz and Starling, Brazil, 24-28.
18 Manoel da Nóbrega, Cartas do Brasil, 1549-1560 (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1988), 90.
19 José de Anchieta, Cartas: Informações, Fragmentos Históricos e Sermões (São Paulo: EDUSP,
Travelers and settlers from other European nations who stayed at the Portuguese colony in the period also shared their impression on the native Brazilians. Even before the accounts of Gândavo and Soares de Souza, French chroniclers André Thevet (1502-1590) and Jean de Léry (1536-1613), contributed with publications about their stays in France Antartique.20 Their descriptions of the original populations of
Brazil were somehow less repulsive than that from the Portuguese, what is regularly argued from the viewpoint that the French got immersed in the indigenous cultures of their allies.21 The emphasis on the ingenuity of the indigenous on the one hand, and
their lack of morals, faith and laws on the other persisted, and reinforced the social hierarchical structure separating these human beings “without any civility” from the European idea of evolution.22
Another important description on the first encounter of Europeans and the native Brazilians lies in the words of Hans Staden (1525-1576), captured in the captaincy of São Vicente by the Tupinambá in 1550.23 The incredible tales of his
successive failed escape attempts, combined with the sensationalistic title of his publication The True History and Description of a Country Populated by a Wild, Naked and Savage Man-Munching People, Situated in the New World, America (1557),24 attracted enormous attention in Europe.25
Staden and Thevet’s publications, adorned with gruesome illustrations of imaginary creatures and images of people eating human flesh, were some of the first depictions of the native Brazilians composing volumes of travelers who had actually set foot in the Portuguese colony in the American continent. Circulating in Europe in
20 Philippe Bonnichon and Gilberto Ferrez, “A França Antártica,” in História Naval Brasileira, vol. 1
(Rio de Janeiro: Serviço de Documentação Geral da Marinha, 1975), 403-471. From 1555 to 1560 the French occupied an area of what today is part of the city of Rio de Janeiro. With the support of the Tamoios, Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon (1510-1571) secured a small island in the Guanabara Bay which was destroyed by the Portuguese Governor- General Mem de Sá (1500-1572) in 1560. The French moved to other coastal areas and indigenous villages in the continent, maintaining the commerce in the region of the Guanabara. The foundation of the city of São Sebastião of Rio de Janeiro, in March 1665 by the Portuguese, was an attempt to reclaim the area from the French, who were only completely defeated in 1670.
21 Anchieta, Cartas, 219.
22 André Thevet, Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique, Autrement Nommée Amérique, & de Plusieurs Terres et Isles Découvertes de Nostre Temps (Paris: Heritiers de Maurice de la Porte, 1557),
51.
23 Victoria Langland, “Portraits: Hans Staden,” in Green, The Brazil Reader, 45-47. Staden, who was
German and feared to be devoured as a Portuguese enemy, initially managed to stay alive by identifying himself as French. Ironically, after having his identity denied by a French visitor, who disclosed to the Tupinambá their prisoner could not even speak French, Staden was rescued by a French vessel nine months later.
24 Hans Staden, Duas Viagens ao Brasil (Porto Alegre: L&PM, 2010 [1557]). 25 Langland, “Portrait: Hans Staden,” in Green, The Brazil Reader, 46.
the second half of the sixteenth century, these prints succeeded the images of the imaginary savages, incredible animals and paradisiac landscapes portrayed in paintings and maps that had been previously produced based on tales and descriptions of the first visitors.
Dating before Staden and Thevet’s publications, the first portrayal of the idealized Brazilian indigenous in Europe is attributed to a broadsheet of 1505 after Amerigo Vespucci’s travels to America (fig. 2).26 Despite the contemporary debate
contesting the accuracy of what is depicted in the woodcut,27 it is irrefutable that the
“great representational machine”28 of the sixteenth century rapidly multiplied the
idealized image of the cannibalistic indigenous beast. From the same period, the first painting depicting a Brazilian Amerindian in Western art is attributed to Vasco Fernandes (1475-1542) and Francisco Henriques (d. 1518). The Adoration of the Magi (1501-06) (fig. 3) portrays an indigenous man adorned with a feathered headdress, feather trimmings and other bodily decorations. He holds a Tupinambá arrow and a basket full of coconuts. By introducing an indigenous motive into a religious composition, the painting could illustrate the necessity of catechism and indoctrination of these people, as suggested by Caminha on his first account of Brazil,29 but it could also be interpreted as an allusion to God’s ability of producing
such different beings,30 as noted by professor Maria Aparecida Ribeiro.
These early accounts and depictions served to fulfil Europe’s ‘thirst for the exotic’ by being adapted, reused and disseminated in books, maps and artworks illustrating the new conquers of the recently found faraway lands. A map of 1532 attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1545) portrays a banquet of human flesh being prepared by ‘savages,’ who hang, cut and roast human parts in the lower left corner of the illustration, under the title of Canibali (fig. 4). The copperplate
26 Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512) was the first to indicate the ‘New World’ was not an extension of Asia,
but a different land mass upon his expeditions in 1501-02, bestowing the continent’s name. His accounts were published between 1502 and 1507, including illustrations of the peoples he allegedly found. Toby Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map
that Gave America its Name (London: Profile Books, 2009).
27 Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Seeking Indianness: Christoph Weiditz, the Aztecs, and Feathered
Amerindians,” Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 1 (April 2017): 51.
28 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago and Oxford
University of Chicago Press, 1991), 145.
29 Caminha, “Letter to King Manuel I,” in Green, The Brazil Reader, 15.
30 Maria Aparecida Ribeiro, “Penas de Índio: A Representação do ‘Brasileiro’ na Arte Portuguesa,” Máthesis, no. 5 (1996): 293, 297.
engravings printed in Theodore de Bry’s Grand Voyages (1593)31 are inspired by Hans
Staden’s prints of his Marburg edition of The True History.32 This circulation of
knowledge about Brazil in sixteenth-century Europe shows the growing interest in the narratives of the ‘New World,’ which could as well be quenched by repetitive images reintroduced in different discourses. The adaptability of this new exotic character of ‘the indigenous’ can be perceived by the slight rigor in which these images were interchanged, adapted and reused in different narratives. In this sense, the heterogeneity of the ‘other’ was reduced to a compact block of traits, habits, objects and activities that could be easily intertwined to describe any exotic inhabitant of the ‘New World.’ In such a way, the Amerindians are paradoxically divine – naïve, pure and candid; and diabolic – cannibalistic, bellicose, uncivilized. The line defining the humanity of these peoples in the eyes of the Europeans can be drawn in both ways according to the circumstances. The same soul that could be worthy of salvation for the Jesuits, for example, was also passive of enslavement for his/her savagery by the colonists.
At the same time, the mild climate, the abundance of plants and animals and the diverse geography of Brazil was also present in the stories of those who visited the land. Caminha defined the coast as “very flat and beautiful,” and the country “so well favored that, if it were rightly cultivated, it would yield everything, because of its waters.”33 Thevet, besides depicting the “barbaric inhabitants of the land,” also
describes the “naturally beautiful” place he encountered, and the monsters he has supposedly seen.34 The notion of a dangerous paradise, inhabited by savages and wild
animals, yet abundant in its natural resources, was also a good illustration for the paradox created around the figure of the Amerindians, sometimes seen as vicious beasts and sometimes as innocent lost souls. This dichotomy applied to the land itself can be interpreted as another way of legitimizing its exploration. Similarly to the indigenous, who could become civilized after conversion, but would always present a threat due to their barbarianism, the recently found land could be magical in its perils,
31 Theodore de Bry (1528-1598) was an editor, engraver and publisher known for illustrating and
publishing accounts of the ‘New World’ without ever being there. Michiel van Groesen, The
Representations of the Overseas World in the De Bry Collection of Voyages, 1590-1634 (Leiden: Brill,
2008).
32 Neil L. Whitehead, "Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism," Hispanic American Historical Review 80, no. 4 (November 2000): 723. The first edition of Hans Staden’s book was
published by Andreas Kolbe (fl. 1557) in Marburg in 1557.
33 Caminha, “Letter to King Manuel I,” in Green, The Brazil Reader, 16. 34 Thevet, Singularitez, 169-170.
but a paradise of wealth for those who could exploit it. Thus, a land of great abundance would require enormous efforts in order to be transformed in material profit. It was a matter of creating a comprehensive plan of occupation and exploitation of the colony based on a model that would enable the maximum profit with the minimum loss.
1.2. The Dutch gaze
The news about Brazil was not restricted to the Iberian domain. As the travel accounts of Staden, Thevet, De Léry and other visitors were published in Latin, French, German and Dutch, among other languages, the European population was well acquainted with the colony’s economic structure and its significance to the Habsburg Empire.35 In
1624, a pamphlet circulating in Amsterdam endorsed a list of “twenty-one motives for which the recently founded Dutch West India Company (WIC)36 should target Brazil
in order to expand the territory of the Republic.”37 By attacking the Portuguese colony
in the Atlantic, the Dutch would consequently strike its ‘illegal owners’ and common enemy: the Spanish Crown. In the same period, Dierick Ruiters (fl. 1623), a Dutch captain who was imprisoned in Rio de Janeiro in 1618 and managed to escape thirty months after, wrote “a practical guide to the networks of trade, the position of European competitors, and the opportunities for the Dutch should they at least decide to enter the field of play.”38
The circulation of information about Brazil inside the Republic came, therefore, from various sources. Together with other publications, such as maps of the conquest of Bahia, books on the Atlantic World, ‘newspaper pills’ and pamphlets of all sorts, the travel diaries and first depictions of the new seized territory, fostered the imagination of the population of the Low Countries.39 With the loss of Bahia in 1625, the initial
excitement of the Brazilian conquest lied dormant for a few years, until the successful
35 The Habsburg Empire refers to the territories of the House of Habsburg that were separated between
the German and Spanish Habsburgs in 1556. For a more contextualized view on the Empire and its relationship with the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century, see: Wim Klooster, The Dutch
Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World (New York: Cornell
University Press, 2016).
36 Hereafter mentioned WIC.
37 Jan Andries Moerbeeck, “Motivos Porque a Companhia das Índias Ocidentais Deve Tentar Tirar ao
Rei da Espanha a Terra do Brasil, e Isso o Quanto Antes,” in Documentos Históricos I: Os Holandeses
no Brasil, trans. Frei Agostinho Keijzers (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto do Açúcar e do Álcool, 1942 [1624]),
25-44.
38 Michiel van Groesen, Amsterdam’s Atlantic: Print Culture and the Making of Dutch Brazil
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 35-36. Ruiter’s volume was entitled Torch of
Sea Travel (1624). 39 Ibid., 36.
siege of Olinda in 1630. After taking Olinda and Recife, the Dutch secured the captaincy of Pernambuco, the “most delicious, prosperous and abundant of all the Portuguese domain,”40 despite the already latent signs of retraction presented by the
sugar industry in the first half of the seventeenth century.41 Once again, detailed
information about the colony played an important role in the occupation. Evidence collected by cartographer Hessel Gerritsz (1581-1632) about the Brazilian coast includes testimonies of Dutch sailors and data provided by Amerindians who were taken to the Netherlands by Admiral Boudewijn Hendricksz (d. 1626) after the fall of Bahia.42 Johannes de Laet’s History of the New World (1625), is also full of descriptive
details of the American continent and the edition of 1630 is adorned with maps from designated locations in Brazil.43
The internal documentation produced in the first years of Dutch Brazil is also the source of the first-hand impressions of the new colonists on the people and the land in the Atlantic. Different from the Portuguese, who in 1500 arrived at a place only inhabited by Amerindians established mostly in nomadic settlements, the Dutch encountered Portuguese governed townships, inhabited by the latter and their descendants, missionaries’ parishes, indigenous villages and a great number of enslaved Africans. A letter from Commander Diederik van Waerdenburch (fl. 1630) to the Directors of the WIC defines the indigenous “not as mere lambs as some stories of the Indies say, but [as] brave and daring soldiers.”44 On the economic side, the same
documents also show that in the first years, the WIC failed to adopt an effective governing model for the colony that could, at the same time, be militarily active against the Portuguese assaults, and increase the profit of the sugar industry. In order to solve this and other concerns, in 1636, the company decided to appoint a Governor-General
40 Frei Manuel Calado, O Valeroso Lucideno e Triunfo da Liberdade, 4th ed., Coleção Pernambucana
(Recife: FUNDARPE, 1985 [1648]), 1:38.
41 Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Olinda Restaurada: Guerra e Açúcar no Nordeste, 1630-1654, 3rd ed. (São
Paulo: Editora 34, 2007), 71.
42 E. Bondam, trans., “Journaux et Nouvelles Tirées de la Bouche de Marins Hollandais et Portugais de
la Navigation aux Antilhes et sur les Côtes du Brésil,” Annaes da Bibliotheca Nacional do Rio de
Janeiro, no. 29 (1907): 99-179. For more information about the indigenous group taken to the
Netherlands in 1625, see: Mark Meuwese, Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous
Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595-1674, vol. 23, Brill’s Atlantic World Series (Leiden, Boston: Brill,
2012).
43 Johannes de Laet, Nieuwe Wereldt ofte Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien, uit Veelerhande Schriften ende Aen-teekeningen van Verscheyden Natien (Amsterdam: Elzevier, 1625). De Laet (1581-1649) was
one of the directors of the WIC and published a number of books about the territories occupied by the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century.
44 Diederik van Waerdenburch to the Council of the XIX, July 23, 1630, quoted in José Antônio
Gonsalves de Mello, Tempo dos Flamengos: Influência da Ocupação Holandesa na Vida e na Cultura
for the occupied territory. The choice of someone “with military experience, but also with enough authority to overawe the civilian council,”45 fell on thirty-two-year-old
Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen.
1.3. Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen’s tropical court
Born in Dillenburg from a family of counts, Johan Maurits was cousin of two stadtholders of the Dutch Republic, Maurits of Orange (1567-1625) and Frederik Hendrik (1584-1647).46 At the age of sixteen, Johan Maurits entered the military
career as a pikeman in the Frisian guard. Reaching the post of colonel by twenty-five, after holding previous positions as cavalryman, captain and lieutenant, he took part in significant battles against the Spanish Crown. The most important, happening in Schenkenschanz, in 1635, where Johan Maurits succeeded in defeating the Spanish army controlling the region. The notoriety he gained from this victory, aligned with his proximity to stadtholder Frederik Hendrik, seemed to be the right ingredients for his appointment as the Governor-General of Dutch Brazil in 1636.47
With the arrival of Johan Maurits’ in the ‘New World’ the Dutch period of Brazilian representation effectively began. For the first time painters travelled to Brazil solely to compose detailed versions of its people, territory, fauna and flora. The count invited a number of artists and scientists to join his entourage, creating a European court amid the latent state of warfare of the colony. With a salary of 1.500 guilders a month, 6.000 guilders of equipment costs and a free-table for him and his invitees, Johan Maurits acted as a patron of the arts and science of his newly built tropical protectorate.48 Consequently, this scientific and artistic promotion provided him with
the necessary knowledge and the material memory of the world he was about to create. The construction of palaces, gardens, zoos, churches and the urbanistic planning of a whole island – Mauritsstad, allowed Johan Maurits to project his idyllic nation in minute detail. At the same time, liturgical practices, the creation of coats of arms and other emblems to represent the colony, the banquets around the free table,
45 Erik Odegard, “Colonial Careers: Johan Maurits Van Nassau-Siegen, Rijckloff Volckertsz. Van Goens
and Career-Making in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Empire” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2018), 62-64.
46 Evaldo Cabral de Mello, Nassau: Governador do Brasil Holandês (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
2006), 21-34.
47 Odegard, “Colonial Careers,” 64-66.
48 Ibid., 95. The free-table was an unlimited supply of food and drinks sent by the WIC to the expense
and the social hierarchy endorsed by titles and privileges, provided the court with the symbolic aura of an ordered and prosperous land.49 The different religious practices
tolerated inside Dutch Brazil, opposed to the Inquisition fomented by the Iberian Crown, has also its share in the configuration of the ‘humanist’ court.50 All of those
aspects have been long investigated by Brazilian and Dutch researchers, generally emphasizing his accomplishments as extraordinary and heroic.51 The artworks
produced in the period are not less praised, usually referred as the true documentation of the peoples and cultures of Brazil.52
49 Arno Wehling, “A Organização Política do Brasil Holandês e o Papel das Liturgias de Poder no
Governo de Nassau,” in A Presença Holandesa no Brasil: Memória e Imaginário, org. Vera Lúcia Bottrel Tostes, Sarah Fassah Benchetrit, Aline Montenegro Magalhães (Rio de Janeiro: Museu Histórico Nacional, 2004), 16-17.
50 See: Jonathan Israel and Stuart B. Schwartz, The Expansion of Tolerance: Religion in Dutch Brazil, 1624-1654 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007).
51 See note 5.
52 Joaquim de Sousa-Leão, Frans Post, 1612-1680 (São Paulo: Civilização Brasileira, 1948), 42; Eduardo
Prado, “L’Art,” in Le Brésil en 1889 (Paris: H. Lamirault et Cie., 1889), 519-572; P. J. P. Whitehead and M. Boeseman, A Portrait of Dutch 17th Century Brazil: Animals, Plants and People by the Artists of
2. Visualizing and materializing Dutch Brazil
2.1. Naar het leven
Frans Post arrived in Brazil in 1637 as a court painter hired by Johan Maurits to document the new Dutch territory. Born in Haarlem in 1612, Post produced oils, drawings, watercolors and sketches depicting diverse elements of the colony for different purposes. His compositions generally portray geographical and architectural interests, but they also present – to great extent – elements of the flora, the fauna and the peoples inhabiting Dutch Brazil.
The illustrations present in Rerum per Octennium (1647), for example, are made from engravings based on Post’s drawings of specific locations in Brazil, Africa and Europe.53 Published in 1647 as a commission to polymath Caspar Barlaeus
(1584-1648),54 the book is a compilation of the achievements of the German governor on
Brazilian soil.55 The laudatory narrative contributed to enhance the princely
perception of Johan Maurits’ persona, with the acclamation of his government in Dutch Brazil, what started to crumble after his departure in 1644.56
In 2010, Post’s known œuvre was amplified with the discovery of new watercolors attributed to the artist. Curator Alexander de Bruin found the series of thirty-four illustrations in the Noord-Hollands Archief, of animals from Chile and Brazil, mostly accompanied by their brief descriptions and accredited names.57 These
drawings are now the only existent examples of animal studies attributed to Post. From his eighteen known paintings produced in Brazil, only seven can be currently located. Nonetheless, more than one hundred and forty oils about the Dutch colony were produced by the artist’s after his return to the Netherlands in 1644, as stated by researchers Pedro and Bia Corrêa do Lago in their lifelong study about the painter.58
Researchers have extensively studied the differences and peculiarities between Post’s Brazilian and post-Brazilian,59 and his paintings have also been analyzed as specific
53 Ibid., 184-185.
54 Caspar van Baerle, in Dutch.
55 Caspar Barlaeus, Rerum per Octennium in Brasilia et Alibi Nuper Gestarum sub Praefectura Illustrissimi Comitis I. Mauritii, Nassoviae (Amsterdam: Joan Blaeu, 1647).
56 Odegard, “Colonial Careers,” 149-151.
57 Alexander de Bruin, Frans Post: Animals in Brazil, trans. Marleen Ram (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum,
2016), exhibition catalog.
58 Pedro Corrêa do Lago and Bia Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post, 1612 – 1680: Catalogue Raisonné (Milan:
5 Continents, 2007), 22.
59 Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait, 178-192; Rüdiger Joppien, “The Dutch Vision of Brazil: Johan
landscape compositions in relation to Dutch seventeenth-century art.60 Since the
landscape genre was widely promoted throughout the Dutch Golden Age, Post’s œuvre insertion in this category is both logical and pragmatic.61 In accordance with this
specific labelling, some authors have devoted themselves in exploring his landscapes as pictorial accounts of an imagined reality. Historian Daniel de Souza Leão Vieira, for example, examines the represented sceneries in relation to the political panorama in which they were created and later assimilated as forging tools of a particular Brazilian identity.62
Besides this evident topographical interest, Post did not prevent his compositions to be filled with the most incredible animals, plants and the people encountered in the colony. By labelling his works as mere landscapes, other elements in the composition are systematically overlooked. In any case, landscapes are undoubtedly subjected to different interpretations and despite being treated as true accounts of reality, they are the story behind what is interpreted by the artists’ understanding of the world. Moreover, colonial landscapes are also imbedded in the dominant context promoted by a colonial endeavor and should not be perceived as a bucolic representation of the vastness of the outside natural world.
The second prominent figure hired by Johan Maurits to document Dutch Brazil was Albert Eckhout,63 whose fame is due to his ‘ethnographic’ series and Brazilian still
lifes.64 Nevertheless, Eckhout’s work “is far more compelling,” encompassing besides
the ethnographic portraits and sketches, “hundreds of drawings and oil studies of the indigenous flora and fauna,”65 as acknowledged by Rebecca Parker Brienen, author of
the latest extensive research on the painter’s life and œuvre.
Scholars point out the scarcity of material referring to his active life as a painter. Little can actually be found on the artist’s earlier life, his tenure as a court painter in Brazil or his later appointment at the court of the elector of Saxony, after his return to
60 Frederik J. Duparc, “Frans Post in Dutch Seventeenth-Century Painting,” in Corrêa do Lago and
Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post, 16-19; Madlyn Milner Kahr, Dutch Painting in the Seventeenth Century, 3rd ed. (New York: Icon Editions, 1982), 238.
61 Joppien, “The Dutch Vision,” 300.
62 Daniel de Souza Leão Vieira, Frans Post e a Paisagem da Nova Holanda (Recife: UFPE, 2019). 63 Like Johan Maurits and Frans Post, Eckhout stayed in Brazil between 1637 and 1644.
64 Art historian Rebecca Parker Brienen and anthropologist Peter Mason have both discussed the
ethnographic attribution to Eckhout’s human series. See: Rebecca Parker Brienen, “Albert Eckhout’s paintings of the ‘Wilde Natien” of Brazil and Africa,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 53, no. 1 (January 2003): 109-113; and Peter Mason, Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 3, 43-63.
65 Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 14.
Europe.66 Nonetheless, Eckhout’s extensive production in Brazil has granted him a lot
of observations and pioneering titles for reproducing the people of the ‘New World.’ His most emblematic series, that of the eight figures representing the inhabitants of Dutch Brazil, are considered the earliest Western images in life-size oils of the people of South America. For its ‘ethnographic’ and historical value, this series has received heretofore the most attention among all Eckhout’s works. It is composed by four indigenous figures – Tapuya Woman (1641), Tapuya Man (1641), Tupi Woman (1641), Tupi Man (1643); two characters of African origins – African Woman (1641) and African Man (1641), and two persons of mixed-race – Mameluca (1641), and Mulatto (1643).67 These paintings are usually analyzed in pairs according to their
racial classification and regarding their function (figs. 5 to 12).68
One aspect these works present, nevertheless, is the assimilated Portuguese characterization of the Brazilian indigenous as either Tupi or Tapuya. Eckhout’s Tapuya Woman is depicted naked and carrying severed human body parts, while the Tupi Woman is partially dressed, holding a healthy child. The clear hierarchization of the works revives the sixteenth-century discourse locating these populations in distinctive levels of civility according to their proximity to European standards and morals. Following this questioning, contemporary art historical and anthropological analyses confronted the initial observations sustaining the documental character of Eckhout’s work with notions such as ‘exoticism’ and ‘social hierarchization.’69 The
66 In a letter from 1653 to Johan Georg, the Elector of Saxony (1585-1656), Johan Maurits affirms Albert
Eckhout had been under his services for eight years. The count was also responsible for Eckhout’s appointment at the German court as further correspondence between him and the elector shows. Quentin Buvelot, ed., Albert Eckhout: A Dutch Artist in Brazil (The Hague: Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis, 2004), exhibition catalog, 17n3.
67 Some of these terms are considered derisive and have been avoided throughout this essay. In specific
cases, they will be used in brackets for they refer to previous interpretations and coined terms. Throughout the years, these artworks have also received different titles. Some variations include:
Tarairiu Woman and Tarairiu Man for the Tapuya couple, Brasiliano(a) for the Tupi pair and African Warrior for the African man. For a discussion about the attributed terms of the works and the Brazilian
indigenous population see: Ingrid Schwamborn, “‘Brasiliano’, ‘Tupinambá’, ‘Tupi’ – ‘Tapuya’, ‘Tarairiu’: A Questão dos Títulos dos Retratos de Albert Eckhout e de Zacharias Wagener, 1641/1643,” in Tostes,
A Presença Holandesa no Brasil, 89-144.
68 Brienen considers the pictures were commissioned by Johan Maurits to be displayed in his Brazilian
palace of Vrijburg, together with the still lifes, the Tapuya Dance and a missing portrait of the count with a group of indigenous. Curator Quentin Buvelot, however, points out to the lack of documentation regarding this assumption. Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 34-36. Buvelot, Albert Eckhout, 35.
69 Besides Brienen and Mason’s contribution regarding the ‘ethnographic’ aspect of Eckhout’s works
(see note 65), Benjamin Schmidt analyses the “exotic body” of Eckhout’s African Woman within its sexualized context. Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe’s
works’ political function have also been discussed, however, on a smaller scale.70
Nonetheless, as the hierarchical structures present in those paintings are still prevalent in contemporary Brazil almost four hundred years after their composition,71
there is no doubt that a more critical evaluation of the creation, function, display and interpretation of these works is needed.
A third important figure in Johan Maurits’ retinue is astronomer Georg Marcgraf, born in Lebstadt, in 1610. In Brazil, Marcgraf had an observatory built for his astronomical observations of the ‘New World’ at Johan Maurits’ Vrijburg palace.72
Despite his expertise in astronomy, the German scientist is generally studied by scholars for his cartographic skills and his multi-perspective contribution to the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae.73 Edited and published in 1648 by Johannes de Laet, one
of the directors of the WIC and an amateur naturalist, the volumes on the natural history of Brazil are considered the first extensive publication on the subject, containing a number of printed woodcuts of plants, animals and people. Divided in twelve books, the Historia was published after the scattered information gathered by Marcgraf and Willem Piso74 in Brazil. Besides the illustrations, it presents detailed
descriptions and notes of the items, especially about the plants and their understanding and usage by the indigenous, the Portuguese, and the enslaved Africans living in the colony.75 Published under the commission of Johan Maurits, the Historia
can also be understood as part of the count’s comprehensive program of documenting his new court. Together with Eckhout and Post’s accounts, the publication of Brazilian natural history, made from ‘real life observations,’ extended Johan Maurits’ artistic patronage to other scientific fields, amplifying his princely image of humanist aspirations.
70 See: Julie Berger Hochstrasser, “Visual Impact: The Long Legacy of the Artists of Dutch Brazil,” in
Groesen, The Legacy of Dutch Brazil, 248-283, and the articles of Rebecca Parker Brienen, “O Envolvimento Mitológico do Brasil Holandês: Interpretação dos Trabalhos de Albert Eckhout e Frans Post (1637-2011),” 75-92, and Daniel de Souza Leão Vieira, “Frans Post, a Paisagem e o Exótico: O Imaginário do Brasil na Cultura Visual da Holanda do Século XVII,” in Brasil Holandês: História,
Memória e Patrimônio Compartilhado, org. Hugo Coelho Vieira, Nara Neves Pires Galvão and
Leonardo Dantas Silva (São Paulo: Alameda Casa Editorial, 2012), 93-124.
71 Schwarcz and Starling, Brazil, 580-586.
72 Neil Safier, “Beyond Brazilian Nature: The Editorial Itineraries of Marcgraf and Piso’s Historia Naturalis Brasiliae,” in Groesen, The Legacy of Dutch Brazil, 173.
73 Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait, 154-155.
74 Born in Leiden in 1611, Piso became Johan Maurits’ personal physician in Brazil, after the death of
doctor Willem van Milaenen (d. 1637). Piso’s input to the Historia is related to the medical knowledge and observations made in the first section of the volume.
75 Georg Marcgraf and Willem Piso, História Natural do Brasil, transl. José Procópio de Magalhães
It is essential to notice, however, that the testimonies produced under the Dutch rule in Brazil are not limited to Johan Maurits’ patronage. Perhaps the most relevant non-commissioned production of the period is Zacharias Wagener’s Thier Buch (c.1640).76 Born in Dresden in 1614, Zacharias Wagener joined the WIC as a common
soldier in 1634. He quickly ascended in his career, first becoming a clerk and from 1637 to 1641 serving as the quartermaster of Johan Maurits at his court in Recife.
Wagener’s book is comprised of hundreds of watercolors, mostly accompanied by a particular description providing fruitful information on the customs of the inhabitants of Dutch Brazil, its hierarchical structure and its commercial practices. Besides several animals and plants, common to most of the works abovementioned, Wagener’s particular attention to the subjugated colonial population, specially the indigenous and enslaved Africans, deserves emphasis. The native peoples of Brazil are illustrated in a few pages,77 accompanied by the representation of a Tapuya dance, and
a Tupi village. The latter containing important information regarding the organization of these settlements and the life of the indigenous under the Dutch rule.
Nonetheless, it is through the depiction and description of the Africans inhabiting Dutch Brazil that Wagener’s work stands out. It can be found in the volume information about a type of African dance, the origin of the enslaved Africans arriving in Brazil, their sale price and the activities they were subjugated to in the colony. It is also in the Thier Buch that we can find visual evidence of Johan Maurits’ as a slave-owner and about the slave-trade as an exclusive practice of the WIC. This is indicated by the watercolors 98: Molher Negra (c.1641) and 106: Slave-Market (c.1641), respectively. The African portraits, like their indigenous counterparts, are assumed to be copies after Albert Eckhout’s life-size images,78 however with some remarkable
differences. Wagener’s enslaved African woman, for example, has a branding mark on her chest (fig. 13), despite wearing similar clothes and adornments to the ones worn by Eckhout’s model (fig. 9). Molher Negra’s descriptive text refers to the practice
76 Zacharias Wagener, O Tier Buch e a Autobiografia de Zacharias Wagener, ed. Dante Martins
Teixeira, Coleção Brasil Holandês (Rio de Janeiro: Index, 1997 [c.1640]). Other non-commissioned testimonies include those of soldier Caspar Schmalkalden (1616-1673) and WIC’s employee Johan Nieuhof (1618-1672).
77 Brienen believes Wagener’s ethnographic drawings were “annotated copies of Eckhout’s paintings,”
while Buvelot questions this assumption. Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 134. Buvelot, Albert
Eckhout, 32.
78 Besides Brienen, other authors endorse this possibility, such as Thomas Thomsen, Albert Eckhout, ein niederländischer Maler und sein Gönner Moritz der Brasilianer: Ein Kulturbild aus dem 17. Jahrhundert (Copenhagen: Levin og Munksgaard, 1938), 80; Whitehead and Boeseman, A Portrait,
introduced by the Dutch to the men, women and children they enslaved inside the colony.79 Brienen suggests the branding – non-existent at Eckhout’s work – was
therefore created by Wagener to illustrate the text.80 However, the emblem chosen by
the German quartermaster was not composed by random letters. This woman is scarred for life with the insignia of Johan Maurits. The intertwined letters I and M under the image of a crown, represent the symbol largely used by the count in documents and objects as self-reference, as it can be noted in an ivory carved chair once belonging to Johan Maurits today at the Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam (fig. 14).81
This distinction between two similar works produced by different authors under specific circumstances can perhaps shed light on the function of the iconographic material commissioned by Johan Maurits during his Brazilian government. Wagener’s Thier Buch is dated circa 1641, the same year of Eckhout’s painting, and if both were present at Johan Maurits’ court at the same time it is likely they have seen or even discussed each other’s representations. Why would Wagener, whose work was not ordered by the count, depict an enslaved woman with the branding mark of Johan Maurits on her chest? And why would Eckhout, whose work was likely to be exhibited in one of Johan Maurits’ palaces, create a more refined version of her, without uncovering the brutal connection between the woman and her master? Whatever the reasons might be, and even if the branding is purely due to Wagener’s artistic license in creating a visual account of his words, at least one thing can be noted: Wagener’s volume is personal and free in its composition, whereas Eckhout’s images are the produce of a courtly assignment. Nonetheless, the fact that the Thier Buch was not produced under Johan Maurits’ commission does not exclude its impact on the image-making of the count’s governance as a humanist prince in the tropics. The relationality between Johan Maurits’ agency and all the material produced in Dutch Brazil goes beyond his own efforts in sponsoring arts and science. As the representations focus on the ‘marvelous wonders’ of the newly acquired territory, and
79 Wagener, O Thier Buch, 175.
80 Brienen, “Albert Eckhout’s Paintings of the ‘Wilde Natien’ of Brazil and Africa,” 115.
81 The branding was first mentioned in a short analysis of the watercolour published in 1979. Frederik
Duparc and Ernst van den Boogaart, eds., Zo Wijd de Wereld Strekt: Tentoonstelling naar Aanleiding
van de 300ste Sterfdag van Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen op 20 dec. 1979, (The Hague: Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen Mauritshuis, 1979), exhibition catalog, 137. This reference is used by Brienen,
Visions of Savage Paradise, 135. Mariana Françozo, however, states the emblem in Wagener’s
watercolour is unknown. Mariana Françozo, “’Inhabitants of Rustic Parts of the World’: John Locke’s Collection of Drawings and the Dutch Empire in Ethnographic Types,” History and Anthropology 28, no. 3 (December 2016): 363, and Benjamin Schmidt affirms the M belongs to Johan Maurits without further justification. Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism, 190-191.
most of their authors lived in Brazil under the Nassovian82 rule, Johan Maurits’
patronage is metaphorically extended, and even as a slave-owner, his presence is reinforced by the works of others outside his entourage.
2.2. Johan Maurits’ Brasiliana as private cultural capital
In May 1644, Johan Maurits left Brazil in a fleet of thirteen ships from which two were exclusively entitled to transport his collection of world artefacts, animals, plants, artworks, furniture and a number of other items that were once adorning his palaces in Recife.83 The same year is also attributed to the completion of Johan Maurits’ palace
in The Hague, where he stayed for three years after his return from the Atlantic colony. Under construction for more than a decade, the Mauritshuis became the set of Johan Maurits’ Kunst- and Wunderkammer, although the precise location of the collection inside the house is unknown.84 From letters and testimonies of visitors such as the one
presented by Adolph Vorstius (1597-1663), it is possible to wonder about the size of the collection, which included depictions of the animals, plants and regions of Brazil, stuffed animals and ivory carved furniture, amongst other ‘marvels.’ Vorstius, a natural historian and professor of Leiden University noticed, among other curiosities, a sofa covered by the “feathers of Indian birds.”85
After his return, Johan Maurits looked into restructuring his life in The Hague by strengthening old friendships with his important relatives, such as the stadtholder Frederik Hendrik and forging new connections with other prominent figures of the lively European court.86 Not much after his arrival he assumed the post of Lieutenant
General of the Cavalry in the Dutch army and started using his Brasiliana collection as strategic gifts to fundament his position of power and prestige inside the court by displaying them to significant members of the elite.87 Besides the accounts describing
his majestic collection of objects, Johan Maurits’ most important Brazilian display was, without a doubt, the peculiar spectacle by the native Brazilians he directed in August 1644. During a banquet at the Mauritshuis, the count offered an indigenous
82 Term coined by historian Evaldo Cabral de Mello. See the chapter “Nostalgia Nassoviana,” in Rubro Veio, 289-318.
83 Cabral de Mello, Nassau, 202. 84 Buvelot, Mauritshuis, 55-63.
85 Adolph Vorstius to Constantijn Huygens, December 12, 1644, appendix 1 to Mauritshuis: The Building, by Buvelot.
86 Françozo, De Olinda a Holanda, 202-203. 87 Ibid., 176-188.
‘show’ to a select group of people, performed by some of the men who travelled with him to the Dutch Republic. The act provoked different reactions in the guests, including repulsion.88 Certainly these men were not catalogued items in Johan
Maurits’ collection. However, by setting up an exotic spectacle to a privileged group of Europeans, the count bestowed his and his guests’ Eurocentric perspective on the performers. When these indigenous men were set to showcase a ritualistic dance, part of their cultural traditions, in order to amuse a select group of people, they were suddenly subjugated in the terms of their ‘uncivility.’89
In seventeenth-century Europe, having a collection of exotic and unique items, especially from the ‘new conquered lands’ of Asia and America, was an extraordinary fact. Those who were able to amass these kinds of items and create a narrative around them, were most likely to benefit from social status and respect.90 Following professor
Mariana Françozo’s extensive research about Johan Maurits’ Brasiliana collection and its use as strategic gifts, one can start to understand how he became successful for building an impressive collection of all sorts of Brazilian things. Besides the objects themselves, Johan Maurits’ physical presence in Brazil in a position of power is also paramount for this understanding. He had been there. He had sponsored his own team of scientists and artists. He exchanged artefacts with Brazilian indigenous leaders and African Kings and had exclusive furniture carved out of Brazilian jacaranda wood and African ivory made.91 He received numerous gifts from sugar mill owners and the elite
of Pernambuco who had decided to surrender into the Dutch rule.92 In short, he was
able to amass his remarkable collection through the connections established in the ‘New World’ as the ruler of a Dutch colonial endeavor, while forging his image as the ‘Brazilian,’ His status as the Governor-General of a plantation colony and his agency in assembling a self-made Kunst- and Wunderkammer gave his collection a unique symbolic quality, making it perhaps more special than others of his time.93 Aware of
his position and condition as an unmarried man with no direct heirs who came from a
88 Ibid., 177.
89 Mason, Infelicities, 43.
90 Virginie Spenlé, “’Savagery’ and ‘Civilization’: Dutch Brazil in the Kunst- and Wunderkammer,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, vol. 3, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 1-2.
91 Françozo, De Olinda a Holanda, 115-127. 92 Calado, O Valeroso Lucideno, 1:112.
93 Other prominent Dutch collections of the seventeenth century include that of stadtholders Frederik
Hendrik and Amalia von Solms-Braunfels, composed of fine art and Asian objects, and the naturalia collection of Leiden University. Françozo, De Olinda a Holanda, 175.
lineage of twenty-four brothers of no influent territory,94 Johan Maurits started using
his collection’s items as tools for negotiating nobility titles and developing his career. In the words of Brienen, his “gifts of Brazil, […] were intended to bind Johan Maurits in closer relationships with the rich and the powerful throughout northern Europe.”95
By offering his objects as ‘gifts’ in exchange of favors from European rulers, Johan Maurits materialized the prestige granted by such items from their initial visual display at his palace, into power. His Brasiliana collection became therefore a political weapon.
Besides Johan Maurits’ lifelong ties with the stadtholder Frederik Hendrik, pivotal for his military ascension,96 the count established connections with three other
very important figures of European elite in the seventeenth century: Frederik Willem, the Elector of Brandenburg (1640-1688), King Frederik III of Denmark (1648-1670) and King Louis XIV of France (1643-1715). Frederik Willem who had become the Elector of Brandenburg in 1640 after the death of his father Georg Wilhelm (1595-1640), had married the daughter of stadtholder Frederik Hendrik, Louise Henriette (1627-1667). Willem’s relation with the Orange dynasty and the fact that he had fought alongside Johan Maurits in the battle of Schenkenschanz against Spain in 1636, might have sufficed for appointing the count the stadtholder of Kleve, in 1647. This appointment was the reason Johan Maurits left the Mauritshuis only three years after returning from Brazil and symbolized the first ‘gift exchange’ between the count and the elector: a binding of rare manuscripts Johan Maurits inherited from his father. In 1650, a new exchange took place, this time including pieces of furniture and decoration objects, elephant teeth and ivory, oil paintings, natural history studies, pistols, rare books, statues, jacaranda wood, among other items.97 These rare pieces, “inestimable
by art collectors”98 were crucial to Johan Maurits social rise. Still in 1652, he was made
Grand Master of the Order of Saint John, and in the next year amassed the most prestigious title of his life, becoming Prince of the Holy Roman Empire.99 Some of the
94 Odegard, “Colonial Careers,” 65-66. Despite his connections with cousin and stadtholder Frederik
Hendrik, Johan Maurits was born in the house of Nassau, with no direct influence in the political matters of the Republic.
95 Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise, 205.
96 After becoming Lieutenant-General of the Cavalry, assumed in 1644, Johan Maurits ascended to the
post of Marshall of the Dutch army, in which he served from 1665 to 1676, until his retirement.
97 Françozo, De Olinda a Holanda, 208-212.
98 Johan Maurits to the Elector of Brandenburg, 1652, quoted in Erik Larsen, Frans Post: Interprète du Brésil (Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro: Colibris Editora, 1962), 253n13. Excerpt of the seventeenth-century
German list containing the description of Johan Maurits’ ‘gifts’ to the Elector of Brandenburg in 1652.
