Painting Brazil for the Dutch art market

So appreciate the “even-handiness “ of your presentation….in other words …..the good the bad and the ugly of colonization by European……the need….the want for sugar…..the drive to explain this back home…..such a gateway to history……

Amazing! Please, more videos on Post and Eckhout paintings!

How timely given the news!

An interesting confluence of Pastoral Idyll/Classical Arcadia; botanical/topographical illustration, and harsh reality.1663 is still an age of aristocracy but you can sense, in the sugar trade, an emerging mercantile 'middle class' (bourgeoisie). It's also worth bearing in mind how Signac, Pissarro, Gauguin and Matisse appropriated/interpreted the conventions of Pastoral Landscape painting.

amazing as usual

I appreciate the intention to point out inconsistencies in Post’s depictions of both landscape and inhabitants vis a vis how northern Brazil “really was” under Dutch rule. However, I wish the speakers were more forceful. As you mention, we have first hand accounts of how the enslaved were dressed (or not): it would be educational to share a little of it. Likewise, the great visual falsehood in the foreground of three enslaved Africans taking a rest - one of them actually sitting down(!) - should be countered by accounts of how easily the enslaved transgressed the laws of empire and what those consequences entailed. It is indeed true that Post and other artists of the period edited their work to court the aristocracy. The reason it is important to forcefully counter their visual fantasy with available information all these centuries later is because their images have coalesced over time and become the received visual “proof” of what colonization looked and felt like. We now know better.

This video took me on a ride. I felt some type of way, lol. My adorkable Dutch crush has run its course and part of the reason - in my view - is our class difference. He is privileged and wouldn't know what to do if an averse breeze blew, whereas I've been to pre-hell and back... twice. So idk! This got me thinking of how history has perpetuated itself and now I can't have gorgeous, mocha frap Jamaican-Dutch babies. Anyway, I live and breathe for the Lord but also for Eckhout's "African Woman." And kudos to him for naming it thus rather than pulling a Post and naming something after a doggone armadillo rather than giving a nod to the people in it! Shady.

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strange to see artists creating idealised works on slavery, better that we can observe through the lens of our time, great video