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All our images can be downloaded in high resolution from our website for non-commercial use (research/study, educational purposes, personal blogs and social media).
Would you like to use our images in a publication? Please mention our credit line: "Mauritshuis, The Hague."
Commercial use
Would you like to use our images for commercial purposes? We would be happy to discuss this with you. Please contact our marketing department at images@mauritshuis.nl.
All our images can be downloaded in high resolution from our website for non-commercial use (research/study, educational purposes, personal blogs and social media).
Would you like to use our images in a publication? Please mention our credit line: "Mauritshuis, The Hague."
Commercial use
Would you like to use our images for commercial purposes? We would be happy to discuss this with you. Please contact our marketing department at images@mauritshuis.nl.
All our images can be downloaded in high resolution from our website for non-commercial use (research/study, educational purposes, personal blogs and social media).
Would you like to use our images in a publication? Please mention our credit line: "Mauritshuis, The Hague."
Commercial use
Would you like to use our images for commercial purposes? We would be happy to discuss this with you. Please contact our marketing department at images@mauritshuis.nl.
All our images can be downloaded in high resolution from our website for non-commercial use (research/study, educational purposes, personal blogs and social media).
Would you like to use our images in a publication? Please mention our credit line: "Mauritshuis, The Hague."
Commercial use
Would you like to use our images for commercial purposes? We would be happy to discuss this with you. Please contact our marketing department at images@mauritshuis.nl.
Frans Post was one of the artists who travelled to Brazil with Johan Maurits. This landscape with a view of Itamaracá Island is the first painting that we know of by Post. And the first that a European painter made of Brazil.
Standing by the water are four men: two Portuguese and two enslaved Africans. Their presence makes the painting more than just a simple Brazilian landscape – Post inadvertently shows us that the inequality between black and white was linked to skin colour.
The hard and dangerous work on the sugar cane plantations and in the sugar mills was done by men, women and children who had been transported from Africa. They were put to work as slaves. We see almost nothing of the harsh side of their lives in Post’s paintings, which present above all an idyllic image of the colony.
on the verso of the original canvas: Het Eijlant ITamaraca gelijck / het selve int Zuijden ver thoont de / stadt legt boven op den Berg beneden / is het Fort orangien het welck leit / inden mont van de Zee op dese / manier sitten de Portugisen de peert / No 443
Provenance
Painted in Brazil for Johan Maurits; presumably part of his gift to King Louis XIV of France, 1679; Eugène Odinot, Paris, 1879; purchased by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. no. SK-A-4271), 1879; on long-term loan from the Rijksmuseum, since 1953
