Visions of a Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (review)

Albert Eckhout (1607–ca. 1666) was one of the artists and scientists brought to the Dutch territories in Northeast Brazil by Johan Maurits von Nassau-Sieghen when Maurits was appointed the colony's Governor General by the West Indies Company in 1637. While Dr. Brienen covers all areas of Eckhout's artistic production, she focuses on the eight full-length figure paintings (four pairs of men and women): the Tapuya Indians, the Tupinamba/Brasilianen, the Africans, and the Mulatto/Mameluca. Her focus is on the gender, ethnicity, and race of Eckhout's subjects, and the way these identities are seen in the colonial environment of Dutch Brazil. Brienen's innovative interpretive strategies, unfortunately, often do not hold up to careful examination, and the monograph as a whole suffers from this. I will concentrate on the African pair as a way of highlighting some of the problematic issues.

One of Brienen's key themes is that Eckhout's figure paintings were ethnographic portraits of specific peoples rather than generalized exotic types. In the portrait of the man, his ceremonial sword is Akan from the Gold Coast of Guinea, and thus Brienen concludes that Eckhout's subject is Guinean. The basket and hat in Eckhout's portrayal of the woman are from Angola, and she becomes Angolan. Yet there is no way of knowing if the "identifying" items really belong to these figures or not. Brienen herself notes a disconnect between the dress of the African man, who wears just a loincloth, and the sword which is associated with individuals of very high rank. Items, such as the Akan sword were highly collectable in the seventeenth-century. Johan Maurits probably gave the very sword seen in Eckhout's picture to King Frederick III of Denmark, another is in the German collection of Christoph Weickmann, and one is shown hanging on a wall in The Curiosities Dealer Pays a Call by Cornellis de Man (Dutch, 15211-1–1706). Perhaps the figures served as mannequins for the artifacts which had their own role as objects of desire to play.

Although Eckhout would have had his subjects directly before him in Brazil, Brienen has the artist turning to a variety of European literary and visual sources to inform his paintings. An illustration in Pieter de Marees's Beschrijving ende historishe verhael vant Gout Koninckrijk van Gunea (1602) is used to identify the African man as a trader, while Ripa's Iconologia, Hendrick Goltzius's image illustrating the saying "Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus Freezes," and other references are employed to interpret the female figure's relation to the European personification of Africa, as well as the concepts of Africa's abundance and the highly sexual nature of her women. Particularly in relation to the painting of the African woman, do the use of these sources indicate that the ideas about Africa and its people were already so established in the European mind that Eckhout's work could only fulfill preconceptions? Is there a difference between conventional and colonial thought? Such questions can equally be applied to the Indians and Mulattos portrayed by Eckhout, and one worth greater examination. Another issue is more practical, how did the painter have access to the literary material? Is the use of European sources an indication that the paintings were made in the Netherlands with Eckhout's own sketches, the artifacts owned by Johan Maurits, and the availability of reference sources?

Although African slaves had been a part of colonial Brazil from the time of the Portuguese and were essential to the success of the sugar trade as acknowledged by Maurits and other WIC officials, Brienen does not consider Eckhout's Africans as slaves. Brienen identifies the man as a trader based on a weak comparison to an illustration in De Marees, while she states that the woman marks the transition to slavery...