THE NEW WORLD IN FRANS POST, The Imaginary of Brazilian Nature in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Painting

This project seeks to study the imaginary of Brazilian nature in Frans Post’s works. The main aim is to comprehend how a painter who had skills to create images according to the codes of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting represented the tropical environment, which has different ecological and ethnographical elements.

Relevance
Since Art History literature on 17th-Century Dutch landscape has barely considered historiography on Dutch Brazil and this latter has mostly limited the use of images as mere illustration of written data, putting Frans Post’s landscapes into interdisciplinary perspective helps scholars to deal with visual contents in order to use image as resource for historical approaches.

Corpus
1) Main Visual Sources: Frans Post’s landscape paintings and drawings;
2) Secondary Visual Sources about Brazil: Albert Eckhout’s “ethnographic portraits” and still-lives; Georg Marcgraf’s Mural Map Brasilia qua parte paret Belgis; oils and watercolors in Theatrum Rerum Naturaium Brasiliae; engravings from Gaspar Barlaeus’ Rerum per octennium in Brasilia and from Willem Piso and Georg Marcgraf’s Historia naturalis Brasiliae;
3) Secondary Visual Sources about Dutch 17th-Century landscape imagery: etchings by Claes Jansz. Visscher, Esaias van den Velde, Willem Buytewech and Jan van de Velde; topographical vistas, decorative details and title pages of cartography published by Claes Jansz. Visscher, Johannes Vingboons and Joan Blaeu; landscape paintings by Jan van Goyen, Allart van Everdingen and Jacob van Ruisdael.
ANALYSIS

Arguing that landscape is culturally constructed by social relations and power, my analysis of Frans Post’s landscapes has shown that:

1) The so-called Brazilian canvases, commissioned by Johan Maurits, Count of Nassau-Siegen, departed iconographically from travel accounts of foreign coasts vistas to depict specific Brazilian sites according to chorographical and accurate topographical profiles. Avoiding a visual repertoire of foreign land and trying to coincide the figurative point of view with a traceable spot in the territory, Frans Post was representing Brazil as a New Holland in the Tropics. This visual strategy was due to a Nassau-orangist colonial project that merged Brazil into Dutch worldwide trade network;
2) The later paintings, done in the context of colonial defeat, were related to a market of the “Exotic”. On one hand, if Nassovian images of Brazil were more integrated into one single structured colonial discourse, on the other, these later images seem to show a crack that revealed two distinct Dutch attitudes to Brazil:

a) General expectations about Brazilian landscapes were related to economical interests about sugar production, slave trade and naturalia for cabinets of curiosity. Therefore, these pushed Frans Post’s production toward an indiscriminating and rather chimerical image, depicting Brazil as Amoenitates exoticae, in images that became known by the critics as capricci;
b) Some other few images, that still depicted Brazil in straight reference to specific Brazilian localities, used the motif of ruins to evoke vanitas conventions in order to mark a visual memento of colonial failure. This smaller public for Brazilian landscapes were probably discontented with civil rule after the end of stathouderate in 1650. These images were related to a discourse that criticized merchants’ greed and decaying morals.

RESULTS
PhD dissertation and publication.