5 Brienen

R e b e c c a Pa r k e r B r i e n e n chapter 4
Visions of Between the Savage and the Civilized

Savage Paradise Eckhout’s Brasilianen and Tapuyas
Albert Eckhout, he best-known images in Albert Eckhout’s Brazilian
Court Painter in T oeuvre are his paintings and drawings of Indians, representations that have been
praised by some for ‘accuracy’ and damned by others for ‘sensational’ details.1
These representations include five large-scale paintings, namely a dance scene and
Colonial Dutch Brazil four life-size ethnographic portraits, and ten chalk figure studies (plates 1-5; figs.14;
36-38).2 These images fall into two categories: carefully constructed studio works and
drawings after life. As discussed in the conclusion to this book, Johan Maurits pre-
sented the ethnographic portraits by Eckhout to the king of Denmark in 1654. In a
1679 letter to the Danish court, Johan Maurits described these paintings as represen-
tations of the wilde natien, or ‘savage peoples’, whom he had ruled during his gover-
norship in Brazil. Although Eckhout signed, dated, and noted his Brazilian location
on seven of these works, he did not label the peoples displayed here. Nonetheless,
Johan Maurits’s Danish correspondent, a former WIC employee like the Count, had
little difficulty identifying their ethnicities, describing them as ‘Brazilians, Tapuyas,
mulattos, and mamalucos’ (brasilianen, tapoyers, molaten en mamaluken).3 Similar assess-
ments had already been made in the 1640s: WIC employees Zacharias Wagener and
Caspar Schmalkalden in Brazil and WIC director Johannes de Laet in Leiden all
labelled copies of Eckhout’s Indians Brasilianen and Tapuyas (spelled in a variety of
amsterdam university press ways). Although some scholars have continued to use the term Tapuya, often written
95
‘Tapuya’, these seventeenth-century titles have given way to ones considered more Art historians have had little interest in Eckhout’s paintings until quite recently,
ethnographically precise: Eckhout’s Brasilianen are now called Tupinamba (or Tupi), and they continue to retain their outsider status with respect to the traditional canon
while the Tapuyas have become the Tarairiu. of seventeenth-century Dutch art.9 Called ‘unpainterly’, ‘stiff’, and ‘awkward’ into the
As I argue here, the most appropriate titles for the figures in Eckhout’s works 1960s, Eckhout’s works were not considered worthy of scholarly attention.10 Largely
are the ones that seventeenth-century northern European observers applied to them: ignored by historians of Dutch art, in the 1970s scholars such as William Sturtevant,
Brasilian and Tapuya. Although these designations now carry little anthropological Hugh Honour, and Rüdger Joppien began to incorporate Eckhout’s images into their
weight, they are essential for understanding Eckhout’s paintings. Brasilian is the title studies. These scholars were united by their interest in early European images of the
that was most frequently applied to the Indians living in the aldeas or ‘mission settle- New World, and all of them endorsed Eckhout’s artistic skill by celebrating his accu-
ments’ under European supervision.4 It is a title that endorsed their assimilation as racy and portrait-like presentation. Sturtevant further placed Eckhout in an impor-
well as their position as the most widely recognized indigneous group. Tapuya, on tant position in the literature on the European reception of the New World, stating:
the other hand, was a pejorative title of Tupí origin that carried the connotation of ‘the first convincing European paintings of Indian physiognomy and body build of
savagery. These titles set up a contrast between the colonized and the untamed (and which I am aware are those by Albert Eckhout done in Brazil in 1641-43’.11 Joppien,
untamable), a seventeenth-century Brazilian version of Columbus’s distinction between whose 1979 wide-ranging essay on Johan Maurits and his artists is still essential read-
the Arawak and the Carib. ing, highlighted the unique status of these images, which are the first full-length
paintings of Indians made in the Americas. Like Sturtevant and Whitehead and
Boeseman more recently, Joppien also endorsed Eckhout’s accuracy, stating that the
The Changing View of Eckhout’s Accuracy ethnic portraits are ‘extremely truthful in their different physiognomy and general
physical appearance... [and] make no attempt to eschew ethnic truth or to compromise
Seduced by Eckhout’s pictorial naturalism and adoption of the ethnographic mode for it for the sake of European taste or feeling for decorum’.12
making images, observers from the seventeenth century onward have traditionally Historians, anthropologists, and art historians alike have nonetheless turned an
regarded his figural works as accurate representations of particular ethnic groups in increasingly critical eye to representations of indigneous Americans in European lit-
Brazil. Just as scientist Christopher Mentzel valued Eckhout’s natural history oil studies erature and art of the early modern period. As many scholars have demonstrated, such
for their botanical and zoological content (discussed in chapter 2), scholars of South works often served to denigrate the ‘native’, thereby naturalizing the unequal power
American Indians, including the famous German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt relationship between Europeans and those whom they had conquered and colonized.13
(1769-1859), have been drawn to the paintings because of their status as anthropo- In his 1979 study of Dutch-Tarairiu relations, historian Ernst van den Boogaart broke
logical records.5 This traditional view was given new life as recently as 1989 by the new interpretive ground by suggesting that Eckhout’s paintings of Tapuyas, which he
natural historians P.J.P. Whitehead and M. Boeseman in their encyclopedic study of labeled Tarairiu, and Tupinamba from the ethnographic portrait series were con-
the works of art and science produced in Dutch Brazil. Here they praised Eckhout for ceived in opposition to each other, setting up a dichotomy of savage and civilized
his sensitivity to the actual appearance of seventeenth-century Brazilian Indians, stating Indians.14 As he noted, the Tapuya/Tarairiu are naked and occupy wild landscapes.
that his life drawings of the Tapuya in particular are ‘virtually unsullied by European The man’s face is ‘deformed’ by ornaments, and the woman carries body parts, sig-
pose, body proportions or physiognomy’.6 Although they recognized that the paint- naling cannibalism. The Tupis, by contrast, wear clothes to cover their genitals, and
ings were removed from the moment of direct transcription, Whitehead and Boeseman they are juxtaposed with manioc and bananas in cultivated landscapes. According to
nonetheless stated with confidence that Eckhout’s ethnographic portraits ‘did not this interpretive model, the semi-civilized Tupinamba are ‘recruits to civility’ while
greatly distort the honesty of the first-hand observation’.7 As summarized by White- the cannibalistic Tapuya/Tarairiu remain stubborn, ‘irredeemable’ savages.15 Van den
head and Boeseman: ‘Eckhout was not a great painter’, but ‘he had an extraordinarily Boogaart expanded this hierarchy of civility to three levels by including the rest of the
honest and penetrating eye when it came to seeing what was before him’, suggesting images in Eckhout’s ethnographic portrait cycle. The mameluca and the mulatto man,
that his vision was not clouded by the ‘over refinement’ associated with artistic train- whose fathers are Europeans, hold the top position. The Africans are coded semi-civ-
ing.8 If one endorses this line of interpretation, Eckhout’s paintings are sources of ilized like the Tupis and occupy ‘more or less’ the same level as their Indian counter-
anthropological, botanical, and zoological data, not carefully constructed works of art. parts. As argued by Van den Boogaart, Eckhout’s series ‘illustrates Dutch rule’ over
96 visions of savage paradise between the savage and the civilized 97

the indigenous American population and functions as a justification for the ‘civilizing’ visual tradition for Brazilian Indians, Dutch ideas and stereotypes about indigenous
presence of the Europeans.16 peoples, and his own artistic training.
Recent work on Eckhout by art historians and cultural anthropologists, includ- Furthermore, an odd slippage occurs in much of the recent scholarship on
ing Paul Vandenbroek, Bodo-Michael Baumunk, and Peter Mason, is indebted to this Eckhout’s images: the paintings are held up as ideological constructions, while schol-
interpretation. These scholars employ a variety of approaches, including post-struc- ars nonetheless insist that anthropologically ‘correct’ titles be applied to the figures
turalism, post-colonial theory, and psychoanalysis to aid their investigation. In his depicted. Displaying a curious twist of logic, scholars first assert that Eckhout’s paint-
essay on Eckhout’s paintings, Baumunk endorses Van den Boogaart’s three levels of ings of the Tapuya, for example, actually represent the Tarairiu, and then criticize the
civility, paying close attention to how the images construct a negative reading of the painter for including ‘sensational details’ or information that is ‘ethnographically inac-
Tapuya. According to Baumunk, the pictorial emphasis on cannibalism and nudity in curate’.24 Anthony Pagden has attacked and labeled anachronistic a similar approach
Eckhout’s paintings of the Tapuya was enough to connect them to witchcraft and devil taken by many historians, who ‘seem to take it for granted that some accurate descrip-
worship in the eyes of early modern viewers.17 Vandenbroek also adopts Van den tive account of the seemingly obvious novelty of the American experience was what
Boogaart’s three-tiered hierarchy for his discussion of Eckhout’s paintings. Addition- the early-modern observer had set out down his long tunnel to achieve’.25 Eckhout’s
ally, he attacks Eckhout’s realistic style as deceptive, arguing that the paintings of the agenda in creating his ethnographic series was informed by many things, but it was in
Tarairiu/Tapuya are ‘ethnographically incorrect’.18 According to Vandenbroek, the no way dominated by an attempt to demonstrate modern anthropological accuracy.
Tarairiu/Tapuya were not cannibals, yet Eckhout’s images reinforce this negative It is not at all self-evident that Eckhout wanted his paintings of the Tapuyas to be
stereotype by including ‘sensational’ details such as the body parts held by the Tarai- identified as Tarairiu. In fact, calling them Tarairiu may give these carefully con-
riu/Tapuya woman. structed works of art more ethnographic authority than they warrant. Similarly, the
Building on the work of the scholars cited above, Mason’s publications have early modern visual and written tradition associated with the Tupinamba is quite
offered the most nuanced reading of Eckhout’s paintings to date.19 Although he sug- distinct from the two paintings that usually carry this label, suggesting that this title
gests that because Eckhout was in Brazil, the paintings made must have some infor- may be incorrect as well. Anthropologists today do not use Tupinamba to designate a
mational value, he primarily analyses these works as colonial statements that reinforce single ethnic group. Rather this term is currently applied to all Indian nations that
a hierarchy of civility and create ‘visual constructions of sexual difference’.20 In his speak (or spoke) a Tupí-Guananí dialect.26
work he contrasts the eroticized representations of the African woman and the Tupi Brasilian is a more appropriate title than Tupinamba, because it conveys the
‘woman with the non-sexualized nudity of the Tapuya woman, who is the most colonized condition of these people, whose men fought in both the Portuguese and
savage female of the group’.21 Beginning with the idea that ‘the “Tapuya” are wilder the Dutch armies. Art historians and anthropologists have paid inadequate attention
than the Tupi, who are in turn less civilized than the mestizos’, Mason pushes this to the titles, Brasilian and Tapuya, which contemporary observors in Europe and
interpretation further by arguing that the ‘ “Tapuya” couple represent the nightmare Brazil applied to the figures in these paintings. Investigation of these seventeenth-
of psycho-analysis – the castrating, aggressive, active female and the (symbolically) century terms with their connotations of ‘savage’ and ‘semi-civilized’ supports Van
castrated and unmanned male’. 22 According to Mason, this negative and dangerous den Boogaart’s broader interpretative framework while suggesting that scholars have
view of the New World ‘suggested that intervention by Europe was needed to restore been hasty in rejecting these titles for ones considered more anthropologically precise.
the proper balance by turning everything the right way around’.23
Mason and Van den Boogaart offer important criticism of the previous litera-
ture by exposing Eckhout’s paintings as visual statements intended to create, justify, The Tupinamba ‘Savages’ of Brazil
and ultimately preserve the European colonial order. Nonetheless, their work pro-
vides a highly limited degree of pictorial analysis and gives inadequate attention to the When Europeans first arrived on the Brazilian coast at the beginning of the sixteenth
early modern visual tradition for Indians in general. Eckhout’s chalk drawings of Bra- century, members of the Tupinamba ethnic group had only recently completed a
zilian Indians, perhaps the Tarairiu, are among the earliest and most sensitive repre- migration northwards and along the coast, driving the area’s previous inhabitants,
sentations of New World people, but his oil paintings are complicated reconstructions whom they identified as Tapuyas, inland.27 Competing Tupinamba groups in the early
that draw on many different sources besides these drawings after life, including the modern period were often at war with each other as well as with neighbouring tribes,

despite cultural and linguistic ties.28 Europeans first traded with the indigenous peo- trated account of Tupinamba lifeways. French Calvinist Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un
ples of Brazil because of the red dyewood, called Brazilwood, from which the country voyage fait en la terre du Bresil (1578) is a more balanced work in both tone and cover-
derives its name. At first the Europeans were satisfied in limiting their contact to the age, offering a rather positive assessment of the Tupinamba. Although his account was
coastal areas. They traded with coastal Tupinamba groups, who harvested the wood first composed in the early 1560s, this book was not published until almost twenty
and brought it to the waiting European vessels, a process that often took several years later. These three publications shaped the European view of South America and
months. As the Portuguese, French, and later the Dutch attempted to establish did much to popularize images of the Tupinamba of Brazil.32
colonies on the mainland, indigneous groups either allied themselves with or attacked Staden’s book details his voyage to Brazil, his work there as a mercenary sol-
these newcomers. dier, and his subsequent capture by the Tuppin Inbas (a Tupinamba group), whom he
The widespread European interest in Brazil’s resources, colonial prospects, and generally refers to as ‘Wilden’ (savages). The book addresses his nine-month period of
its Tupinamba ‘savages’ is indicated by the elaborate Indian villages that the city of captivity, during which he was able to observe the customs and culture of the
Rouen created for the Royal Entry of Henry II in 1551.29 This dramatic event is Tupinamba first hand. Whether or not Staden was strictly truthful in his account is
recorded in a contemporary illustrated manuscript and a published account of the of secondary concern to this analysis; what is of central importance is the popularity
Royal Entry. The villages were peopled with 300 naked ‘Indians’, composed of fifty and influence of this text. It includes a short description of Tupinamba culture, which
apparently authentic Tupinambas and 250 French sailors and prostitutes ‘undressed’ pays special attention to war and the practice of ritual cannibalism. Many of the
for their parts. Here, for the pleasure of the king and his entourage, the ‘savages’ book’s fifty-six illustrations are devoted to these themes. Naked but bearded, Hans
of the New World fought battles, burned villages, and even made love in hammocks Staden himself is a constant presence in the illustrations, functioning as a pious eye-
and behind trees. Less than ten years later, three illustrated books on Brazil were witness observer and victim of the Indians’ ‘cruel’ practices.
published in northern Europe, each specifically addressing the Tupinamba of Brazil. Staden calls the Tupi ‘a fine race and handsome in face and general appearance,
All of these books include detailed discussions of cannibalism, any hint of which was both men and women’, although the people in his crude woodcuts scarcely seem rec-
carefully excluded from the festive entry in Rouen (as it would also be from the fron- ognizable as human beings.33 These images, which may have been based on drawings
tispiece to Piso and Marcgraf’s Historia naturalis Brasiliae). Stories of cannibalism jus- by Staden himself, were nonetheless highly influential, especially as reinterpreted in
tified conquest in the Americas and proved a sensational topic for published works, engraved form by Theodor de Bry in Part III (1592) in his Grands Voyages series on the
but encouraging colonization and royal support required a more subtle approach. New World. Staden’s ethnography includes a fairly detailed image displaying two
Hans Staden’s Wahrhaftig Historia... in Neuen Welt (1557), André Thevet’s Sin- frontally posed men in ceremonial dress (fig. 30). Both men are nude, have shaved
gularités de la France antarctique (1558), and Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en heads with a fringe of long hair at the back, and wear ornamental stones in their faces.
la terre du Bresil (1578) are eyewitness accounts of Tupinamba culture written by Each has a stippling of dots over his body, which represents either paint or feathers.
Europeans who stayed in Brazil for an extended period of time. Staden’s work was the The man on the right wears feathers both on his head and arranged in a circular fash-
first to appear, and it is difficult to overestimate its influence and popularity, although ion on his back, and the man on the left wears a beaded necklace with a half-moon
its accuracy is still being debated.30 This exciting example of ‘survival literature’ tells shaped pendant. This image sets up two visual types for Tupi men, both of which are
the story of the German Lutheran and mercenary soldier’s period of captivity among militaristic. The man on the left holds the elaborately decorated club involved in
the Tupinamba.31 Given his subject matter and narrative approach, it is not surpris- the ritual murder and consumption of prisoners, and the man on the right wears full
ing that Staden’s account became a European bestseller and was immediately trans- battle dress with arrows and a bow. As discussed in chapter 3, like most sixteenth-
lated into a number of languages. The other two books, one by French Catholic century images of non-European people, emphasis is placed on body ornamentation,
André Thevet and the other by French Calvinist Jean de Léry, were written as the hair style, clothing, and other external attributes. In Staden’s illustrations, only the
direct result of a disastrous French attempt at colonization in Brazil between 1555 and Tupinamba men appear truly alien and ‘other’. The women, by contrast, are simple
1560. This missionary venture, which united Huguenots and Catholics (at least in nudes with long braided hair, holding or followed by small children. In all of the
principle) under the leadership of Nicholas Durand de Villegagnon, resulted in a images, including his illustrations of cannibalism, the illustrator demonstrates relative
complete failure because of this explosive religious mix. Thevet’s Singularités de la indifference to Staden’s discussion of the long earrings worn by the women or their
France antarctique (1558) presents a moralizing, contradictory, and abundantly illus- body paint, although body decoration is occasionally indicated by a light stippling.34
Unlike Staden’s extended period in Brazil, Thevet remained there only ten
weeks, and much of that time was spent on board a ship anchored off the coast.
Relying, to a large extent, on the accounts of others, Thevet’s account is a rich mix-
ture of firsthand information and fantasy.35 Like Staden, Thevet’s attention is focused
on the Tupinamba, whom he calls the ‘Amériques’. Nonetheless, Thevet’s text is
more typical of early travel accounts, which unlike Staden’s adventure tale, were writ-
ten to encourage further interest in and settlement of a region. As Thevet states: ‘if
the land were tilled, it wold bring forth very good things, considering how it doth lye
with fayre mountaynes and dales, rivers bearing good fish’.36
Like Staden, Thevet most frequently calls the Amériques ‘savages’; he describes
them as:
a marvelous strange wild and brutish people, without Fayth, without

Lawe, without Religion [sans roi, sans loi, sans foi], and without any
civilite: but living like brute beasts, as nature hath brought them out, eat-
ing herbes and roots, being alwayes naked as well women as men, untill
such time as being more visited and frequented of Christians, they may
peradventure leave this brutish living, and lerne to live after a more civill
and humayne manner. 37
Despite this rather negative and stereotypical description, which owes equal parts to
Vespucci and Mandeville, these Brazilian ‘savages’ demonstrate the possibility for
redemption and civilization, given additional contact with Christians. As noted by
Lestringant, Thevet’s text sets up an opposition between the Amériques of Brazil and
the ‘Cannibals’ who occupy lands to the north.38 Although both groups practice
anthropophagy, the ‘Americans’ unlike the ‘Cannibals’ do not thirst for human blood
but for vengeance, and therefore their practice of eating enemies is made more
acceptable.
As the French royal cosmographer, Thevet had access to better artists than
Staden, and the elegant, if somewhat elongated, bodies of the Indians in his text form
a sharp contrast to the more rudimentary figures in Staden’s book. According to
Thevet, the American ‘savages’ are tall, tawny coloured and ‘wel formed...but their
eyes are eveill made’, which gives them an animal-like appearance.39 The artists who
created the woodcuts for Thevet, most likely active in the circle of French mannerist
Jean Cousins, generally gloss over the author’s more negative comments and instead
present a largely positive view of Indian humanity.40 Even in this image of a cannibal
feast, one can ignore the woman pulling out the victim’s intestines on the left and
instead admire the classical forms of the decapitated torso that lies on the ground at
the right, looking more like a fragment of ancient sculpture than dinner (fig. 31).
fig. 31 – Tupinamba Cannibal Feast, woodcut. Reproduced in André Thevet, Singularités de a France
antarctique (1558). Courtesy of the Annenberg Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. between the savage and the civilized 103
Like Staden, Thevet mentions that the women stain their skin, but this aspect
is absent from the illustrations, which present remarkably European figures. As pic-
tured here, the men have somewhat small heads, but their nude bodies are heroic and
well-muscled. The women, with their small, high breasts, flowing hair, and statue-like
bodies, correspond to an ideal female type seen in sixteenth-century northern Euro-
pean prints. Although the men display a monk-like haircut and occasionally wear
feathers, Thevet’s illustrations do not emphasize facial decoration, with the result that
the men look less ‘savage’ than Staden’s.
Despite their idealized bodies, Susi Colin has argued that this illustration of a
Tupinamba family enjoying a meal reinforces Thevet’s negative description of their
eating habits (fig. 32).41 Although Thevet begins this chapter by asserting their lack
of civility in eating, he commends their ‘marvellous silence’ at mealtimes and their
tendency to share food equally, even with Christians.42 It is difficult to read this image
as a condemnation of the Tupinamba simply because it displays them sitting and lying
down while eating and swallowing fish whole. Such ‘barbaric’ tendencies are surely
offset by the peacefulness of the lush, exterior setting and the attentiveness of the
parents to their young children. Other more clearly positive images of the Tupinamba
in Thevet’s text include idyllic representations of men and women harvesting fruit and
wood.43
Although Ter Ellington has recently argued that our contemporary under-
standing both of what ‘noble savage’ means and Rousseau’s involvement in the creation
of this concept, were largely invented in the mid-nineteenth century by anthropolo-
gists, this does not detract from the fact that there is an older, well established tradi-
tion in European art and literature (drawing in part on ideas about a Golden Age in
Greco-Roman mythology), which idealizes the primitive, pastoral lifestyle and expres-
ses admiration for the ‘good savage’ (le bon sauvage).44 The cannibalistic acts ascribed
to South American Indians in the early modern period horrified Europeans, but
scholars recognize the deep sympathy for the Tupinamba expressed by Michel de
Montaigne in his 1580 essay ‘On Cannibals’. Here Montaigne gave his Tupinamba
informant – whether real of fictive – the ability to speak back and respond to the cri-
tiques of his culture and offer his own critiques of European society.45 In writing this
work, which specifically addresses the peoples of ‘France Antarctique’, Montaigne
drew heavily on Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Bresil, the last of
the three Brazilian books under consideration here.
In this work, Léry’s cultural relativism does much to place the idea of South
American cannibalism into a broader comparative context. As argued by Lestringant,
Léry and Montaigne create ‘a sort of allegorization of the savage, making him incar-
nate, for example, the realm of nature, primitive equality, or the leisurely freedom of
an Ovidian golden age’.46 Of the three authors, Léry’s ethnography is the most
fig. 32 – Tupinamba Family Eating, woodcut. Reproduced in André Thevet, Singularités de la France
104 visions of savage paradise antarctique (1558). Courtesy of the Annenberg Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
detailed, sensitive, and informative. It is also the best written of the three, probably In Staden and Thevet, the majority of the images are busy with activities and
because he had nearly twenty years to write, rewrite, and meditate on his experiences interacting bodies. To illustrate Thevet’s discussion of the generosity of the Amériques
before the first edition of the work appeared in 1578. Léry’s information, although and their customary weeping greeting, the artist represents the interior of a native
supplemented by Thevet’s France Antarctique, was based on his first-hand experience dwelling occupied by six adults and one child.56 The illustration of the same activity
living among the ‘savages of America who live in Brazil, called the Tupinamba’.47 in Léry’s text borrows its female figure from Thevet’s illustration. Here, however, the
During the year that he was in Brazil, Léry stayed in an indigenous village for around artist has focused the viewer’s attention solely on bodies and gestures, because he has
two months, which allowed him intimate access to the Tupinamba and their culture. reduced the number of participants to three, removed the setting, and made the fig-
For Whatley, Léry’s chapter 15 on how the Tupinamba kill and eat their pris- ures much larger. Léry’s illustrations stand apart from the images in these earlier
oners and chapter 18 on their laws and civil order provide opposite, but mutually books because of their solemn, almost reverential quality and their insistent pictorial
informative, glimpses of the Tupinamba society.48 Here Léry describes the ritual of emphasis on the nude male Tupinamba body (fig. 33). As noted by Claire Farago,
death, replete with honor for both the victim and his executioners. Like Thevet, Léry Léry’s Tupinamba are ‘iconic, sculpturally-conceived figures, modeled in light and
makes certain that the reader knows that the enemy is consumed ‘more out of ven- shadow, with only a bare indication of a setting’.57 As a possible source for this
geance than for the taste’, making cannibalism (as in Thevet) part of their culture approach, Farago suggests the ‘anatomical mode’ employed by Vesalius’s artists for
instead of their nature.49 Chapter 18 offers a complete overview of Tupinamba human- the human figures in his anatomy texts, such as De humani corporis fabrica (1534).58
ity, from their weeping, grateful greetings to friends and strangers to their artistic skill The full-length, dynamic, and non-narrative images of Tupinamba men in Léry’s text
in decorating earthen vessels.50 Léry finds much to admire, stating, ‘it is an incredible can be viewed as precursors to the ethnographic portrait as practiced by Albert
thing...how a people guided solely by their nature, even corrupted as it is, can live and Eckhout, although his knowledge of them may have been mediated through other
deal with each other in such peace and tranquility’.51 sources, such as the engravings after them in de Bry’s Grands Voyages.59
The difficulty in producing an accurate representation of the Tupinamba of The complicated ideas about and images of the Tupinamba present in the
Brazil, or indeed of any newly encountered people, is emphasized by Léry in this works of Staden, de Léry, and Thevet reached their largest audience via de Bry’s 1592
book. As he states: ‘you would need several illustrations to represent them well, and publication of Part III of the Grands Voyages series, which focuses on Brazil with a text
even then you could not convey their appearance without adding painting’.52 Perhaps based on Staden and de Léry. The artful engravings included here, which have been
this frustration with the limitations of the printed image is what made him include studied in detail by Bernadette Bucher, are idealized and highly reworked copies of
only six woodcut illustrations in the first edition of this book. While it is unlikely that Staden’s woodcuts, presenting a synthesis of Léry’s robust nudes and the elegant fig-
the artist had firsthand knowledge of their appearance, these illustrations nonetheless ures in Thevet’s work. When one compares any of de Bry’s engraved images of the
support Léry’s generally positive view of the Tupinamba (fig. 8).53 Léry states with Tupinamba to Staden’s originals, they are unrecognizable with their newly ‘statuesque
approval that the Tupinamba are ‘stronger, more robust and well filled out, more bodies and Roman profiles’ (fig. 28).60 De Bry’s illustrations of the Tupinamba are
nimble, [and] less subject to disease than Europeans’, although he does not condone more convincing than the woodcuts they are based on, in part because the engravings
their nudity.54 In the book, the men are presented as well-muscled and heroic nudes, are far more artful and attractive than the earlier images, but also because these later
but they are shorter and stockier than the elegant figures in Thevet’s text, with which prints give greater attention to facial expression and naturalistic body movement
Léry’s artist was clearly familiar. The attention to faces, which appear heavy set and (here, for example, it is clear that the women are really enjoying their feast of human
rounded, suggests an attempt to reproduce a more accurate appearance of the Tupi- flesh). Of course, the more detailed representations of Tupinamba artifacts, including
namba. Léry calls their skin colour ‘tawny... like the Spanish or Provencals’, making feather bustles, headdresses, and clubs in other images, also lend an air of authenticity.
them less exotic by likening them to Europeans. The artist has nonetheless made an Nonetheless, de Bry’s frontispiece to this Brazilian volume of the Grands Voyages is
attempt to indicate their ‘tawny’ complexion through cross-hatching and shading.55 quite opposite the Eden-like entryway presented fifty years later on the title page of
Attention to skin colour or external decoration, including lip plugs, half-moon shaped Piso and Marcgraf’s Historia naturalis Brasiliae (figs. 5, 34). In de Bry, the reader is
necklaces, and scars, is nonethelesss clearly secondary in importance to the overall instead greeted by a Tupinamba man and woman, who stand on an architectural frame-
physical presence of the nude male’s body. Léry’s women, as in the other texts dis- work and bite into severed limbs, preparing the reader for the savagery that follows.
cussed above, are entirely European in conception and appearance.
fig. 33 – Tupinamba Man, woodcut. Reproduced in Jean de Léry, Historie d’ un voyage (1578). fig. 34 – Frontispiece, engraving. Reproduced in Theodor de Bry, Grands Voyages, Part III (1592).
Courtesy of the Annenberg Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Courtesy of the Royal Library, The Hague.
Eckhout’s paintings of the Tupinamba are clearly more informative than the by Olivia Harris, ‘By the late seventeenth century “Indian” culture was thoroughly
printed images addressed above, despite the apparent ‘ethnographic authority’ of de “mestizo” ’.66 Although her work focuses on the indigenous peoples of the Andes, the
Bry’s engravings. Eckhout’s naturalistically painted, life-size images display careful same holds true for the Tupinamba of Brazil.
attention to skin colouration (not possible in black and white prints), the reproduc-
tion of identifiable artifacts, and the delineation of an appropriate setting. But it is
more than a difference in medium, size, and descriptive content that sets Eckhout’s The Tupinamba/Brasilianen and the Dutch
works apart from these earlier images. Although it has not been addressed in the
scholarship, Eckhout’s Tupinamba are puzzling if one compares them to the impor- In 1625, four years after the establishment of the WIC, Company director Johannes
tant sixteenth-century tradition discussed above. What does Eckhout’s allegedly de Laet published his Nieuwe Wereldt ofte Beschrivinghe van West-Indien (New World
Tupinamba man, with his white shorts, European knife, and groomed facial hair, have or Description of the West Indies), in which he included a description of the ‘diverse
to do with the naked, feather-ornamented, and painted cannibals described and rep- nations found in Brazil’, originally written by the Portuguese Fernão Cardim in 1584.
resented in the books by Staden, Thevet, Léry, and de Bry? Is it even correct to call In this widely known and frequently reproduced description, we find clear evidence
the man and woman in Eckhout’s paintings Tupinamba? Like the label Tarairiu, that European observers were able to distinguish between multiple ethnic groups pre-
Tupinamba will be exposed as an equally problematic addition to these paintings. sent in Brazil. This text describes the Topimanbazes as sharing language and ‘other
things’ with the Petivares, who are cannibals, but less ‘barbaric’ than the rest of the
Indians in Brazil.67 The Topimanbazes are noteworthy for their attractive women and
How the Tupinamba Became Brasilianen for the fact that the men let their beards grow, this facial hair setting them apart from
other South American Indians. The Petivares may be the same as the Patiguares ofte
During the second half of the sixteenth century, after their numbers had been deci- Brasilianen (Patiguares or Brazilians) described in 1639 as a Tupinamba nation origi-
mated by war, disease, and slavery, the Tupinamba peoples who did not escape into nally allied with the French and harbouring a deep hatred of the Portuguese.68
the interior were gathered into supervised villages by the Portuguese, with only a In his 1647 history of Dutch Brazil, Rerum per octennium in Brasilia, Caspar
small group of them remaining undefeated on the coast north of Bahia.61 In the aldeas, Barlaeus calls the Brasilianen the ‘former inhabitants and lords of these lands’.69 But
Jesuits taught the Indians Portuguese and rooted out unacceptable practices, such as to whom is he referring? The colonization of northeastern Brazil by the Dutch result-
habitual nudity and ritual cannibalism. The aldeas were the ideal location for prosely- ed in discussions about and descriptions of the indigenous population, many of which
tizing and converting the Indians to the Roman Catholic faith. From the European have survived in the form of WIC reports, letters, pamphlets, and the Historie ofte
point of view the advantages implicit in this system were summed up by one of the iaerlyck Verhael (1644), de Laet’s four-part history of the WIC between 1624 and
Jesuits, who stated that in these villages the Indians ‘have become civilised and are 1636. Although scholarship on Eckhout’s paintings has tended to emphasize the
saved’.62 descriptions found in Zacharias Wagener’s Thierbuch (ca. 1641), I have supplemented
After his capture in 1635, Portuguese Jesuit Manuel de Moraes defected to the this important source, addressed in greater detail in chapter 5, with information from
Dutch side, bringing with him 1,600 colonized Indians from the aldeas of Paraibai and other contemporary accounts. Study of these printed and written documents demon-
the Rio Grande region.63 These Indians, members of a Tupinamba ethnic group, soon strates that the word Brasilian was frequently used by the Dutch and WIC employees
became important to the fledgling Dutch colony as their main auxiliary soldiers.64 to designate the indigenous people living within the aldeas. Only occasionally was it
The WIC adopted the aldea system, which Dutch ministers then operated like their used as a generic label for all indigenous people in Brazil.
Portuguese predecessors, as the ideal venue for converting the Indians. But in this Barlaeus’s sources for his book included letters by Johan Maurits and WIC
case, the conversion was not simply to Christianity, but to Calvinism. Abolition of the reports, including the July 1639 report on the captaincy of Paraiba by Elias Herck-
‘Papist’ Roman Catholic beliefs introduced by the Portuguese was the goal; the orig- mans, a Political Councillor in Brazil.70 In Herckman’s report Brasilianen are the peo-
inal belief systems of the missionized Indians, along with much of their original cul- ple who have come under Dutch control. The aldeas, which he calls ‘villages of the
ture, had already been supplemented by, and to some extent replaced with, Western Brasilianen’, are where the Brasilianen receive religious instruction.71 More informa-
ideas and values.65 This process was occurring all over South America. As argued tion is provided in a pamphlet written in 1639 by Vincent Joachim Soler, a Calvinist
minister in Brazil. Soler states that there are thirteen aldeas under Dutch jurisdiction, Eckhout’s Brasilianen
having a total of twenty thousand Indian souls, although it is likely that he overesti-
mated this number.72 Here the Brasilianen are baptized, married, and adopt Christian In Eckhout’s painting (plate 4), a scantily clad Brasilian woman stands on a hill and
names.73 As Soler further notes, the men from the aldeas make up a regiment of twelve stares blankly out at the viewer, with an orderly plantation of citrus trees pictured in
companies and fight with the WIC’s soldiers in Brazil.74 Zacharius Wagener further the background behind her. On her head she carries a basket holding a rolled-up net,
notes that the Brasilian men are ‘well versed in handling muskets and other fire-arms’. possibly a hammock, and several calabash containers.83 Her small nude daughter, whom
Although he argues that they never ‘submitted to the yoke of obedience’ under the she supports on her hip, lightly touches her mother’s right breast and turns her small,
Spanish [Portuguese], the colonized status of the Brasilianen under Dutch rule is made lively face towards the viewer. A reddish gourd on a string hangs from the main figure’s
clear by Wagener’s offhand comment that officers [presumably WIC officials] do not right wrist, and she gently supports the overladen basket on her head with her left
allow them to consume alcohol on a daily basis.75 hand. Her smooth, light brown skin shows no evidence of body painting or jewellery.
Descriptions of these colonized and semi-civilized Brasilianen are much more The wheat-coloured woven basket is her only distinctive possession; her long thin
subdued than the tales told about their more colourful ancestors, the Tupinambas. As braids interwoven with white and red string are her only distinctive decoration. To her
Van den Boogaart notes, ‘the written sources on the Tupi are remarkably brief and left is a banana tree, introduced by Europeans into Brazil just like the citrus trees plant-
insipid’, clearly referring to the seventeenth-century reports and not those from the ed in neat rows behind her.84 A large greenish toad sits on the ground at her feet.
sixteenth century.76 Contemporary observers in Dutch Brazil noted that the Indians On the plantation grounds behind her, twenty-one tiny human figures, mostly
in the aldeas raise crops, including fruit and the manioc root, which is used to make Brasilianen like the main figure and her child, are busy tending animals and children,
their bread. In addition to serving in the WIC’s army, Brasilianen work on the sugar carrying baskets, or resting in hammocks stretched between the trees. Most of these
plantations cutting firewood, caring for animals, and planting sugar cane.77 Soler figures are women, wearing the long white dresses described as the clothing typically
states that they ‘are a very simple people, without malice, of few words, and with no worn by Brasilian women, not the short white skirt with exposed breasts of this paint-
ambition to possess earthly goods’.78 Wagener comments that they are ‘always happy ing’s main figure. In between the rows of trees on the right, men clad in white shorts
and well-humoured, notwithstanding their poverty and misfortune’.79 They sleep in hold weapons, a rifle and possibly a spear. A watchful European presence is embodied
hammocks, drink from calabashes, and use a bow and arrow for hunting.80 Recalling by the lord and lady of this tropical manor, recognizable as such because of her cloth-
descriptions in Staden, Thevet, and Léry, Herckmans points out their use of a black ing and his broad black hat. They stand on the balcony of the second floor of the
dye called ‘jennip’, but the practice of staining their bodies with it has disappeared.81 house and look out over their servants, trees, and livestock below. As scholars have
Perhaps most significantly, the Brasilianen wear clothing to cover their nudity; the suggested, this is a calm and cultivated landscape, reflecting the status of the main fig-
women wear long cotton dresses, and the men wear trousers and a coat.82 The sources ure within this colonized realm and its European overseers.85
agree that the Brasilianen work only to earn enough to pay for the clothes they wear, Eckhout’s Brasilian man (plate 5) is dressed in a simple pair of white shorts,
which they get from the Dutch. Their negative characteristics are limited to an obses- like the tiny male figures in the background behind his female counterpart.86 His thin
sion with dancing, laziness, and the abuse of alcohol. The use of hammocks, the cul- moustache and small trimmed beard are highly unusual in an image of an Indian from
tivation and consumption of manioc, and the distillation of alcohol from cashew fruit this period, who were more generally known for their lack of body hair.87 He holds a
are, for the most part, the only cultural similarities left over from earlier descriptions bow and four arrows, in addition to a European knife with a metal blade, which is
of the Tupinamba. As will become clear in the discussion below, Eckhout’s paintings stuck into the waistband of his shorts. Like the Brasilian woman, his smooth brown
of the Tupinamba, more properly called Brasilianen, are far closer to the colonial real- skin bears no evidence of staining, painting, or other ornamentation. Although his
ity of the aldea than the sixteenth-century ‘savage’ of Staden, Léry, and Thevet. outward gaze is curiously unfocused, his tools suggest that he will soon be hunting for
meat to supplement the blue crabs and manioc roots at his feet. Manioc roots are
planted in a cluster behind him, and a small, unconvincing green hummingbird perch-
es on a branch of one of the fully developed plants.88
From the top of the hill where the main figure stands, a peaceful and idyllic
green and blue river landscape stretches out into the distance. As embodied by the
lord and lady on their balcony in Eckhout’s painting of the Brasilian woman, this
painting also includes a European presence in the deep background. Sitting in a small
boat in the middle of the river, three men in dark clothing and broad hats survey the
bathing and washing activities of the men and women along the shore.89 The purpose
of the European presence in these two paintings goes beyond the voyeurism suggest-
ed by their proximity to the four nude women bathers in the background here. They
observe, control, and construct the activities of the Brasilianen, both within the paint-
ings and in the colony itself, becoming a ‘conceptual vanishing point’.90 The Euro-
pean I/eye structures the work and dictates its limitations as well as its possibilities.
Although white Europeans are not portrayed as one of the paired national types in
this series of ethnic types, they form the ideal against which the others must be mea-
sured.91 Their depiction in the backgrounds of these two works affirms that their
presence in the portrait series is not simply indirect.
For the Dutch, the Brasilianen were the aldea or ‘mission’ Indians, a people
in the process of assimilation into what was the dominant culture, thus occupying
an entirely new taxonomic category – neither fully Indian nor fully European.
Accordingly, the visual tradition of the Tupinamba was both inappropriate and inac-
curate for his purposes. Eckhout had to create a new genre of representation for the
Brasilianen that would visually convey the idea of a people undergoing cultural
fig. 35 – Inhabitants of the ‘Great Bay of Antongil’, engraving. Reproduced in Willem Lodewycksz,
change. To a much greater degree than his Tapuyas, his paintings of Brasilianen are Historie van Indien (1598). Courtesy of the Royal Library, The Hague.
unprecedented. This does not mean, however, that Eckhout began the process of cre-
ating a new ethnographic type with a clean slate. He made studies after life, including
a delicately drawn image of a young girl in a long white skirt in the Miscellanea Cleyri series, although Eckhout’s painting could have been based on the original illustration,
volume.92 which shows the woman in the same pose, unlike de Bry’s mirrored version.
Given the absence of an established visual tradition for the Brasilianen, Images of indigenous women wearing little or no clothing were a fairly stan-
Eckhout may also have sought inspiration from illustrations in accounts of travel to dard feature of travel accounts by the mid-seventeenth century. In this category we
other parts of the world. The body of Eckhout’s Brasilian woman, for example, resem- find the native mother type, who exposes her breasts to the viewer and holds the hand
bles a female inhabitant of the ‘Great Bay of Antongil’, as illustrated by Willem Lode- of a small child or breastfeeds a baby, as seen in both Eckhout’s painting and the print
wycksz in his Historie van Indiën (History of the Indies, 1598) (fig. 35).93 On the right discussed above. As early as the 1505 German illustration discussed at the beginning
side of the print, a woman clad only in a skirt carries a nursing child on her left hip of chapter 3, breastfeeding was considered an appropriate and characteristic activity
and holds a small bag in her left hand. The similarities to Eckhout’s painting are not for Indian women. The interest in depicting activities associated with childcare is
limited to the frontal stance, short skirt, exposed breasts, and small child. Each woman made explicit in the text that accompanies the image of the inhabitants of the Great
also displays a high forehead, wide-set eyes, pursed lips, and a broad nose (a similar Bay of Antongil, which states: ‘Their women carry their children on their hip and
type of female face is also seen in the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter breast-feed them in this manner’. While breastfeeding was certainly practiced by
Paulus Bor, whose possible connection to Eckhout is discussed in chapter 1). 94 women around the world, the decision to represent it as a traditional activity of
Characterized in the text as a shy, ‘well-formed’, and friendly people who traded food- indigenous women may say more about contemporary debates regarding the proper
stuffs to the Dutch, this image of a peaceful indigenous group would have formed an maternal duties of European women than actual social practises outside of Europe.
appropriate point of reference for Eckhout’s semi-civilized Brasilianen. Copies of In her recent analysis of French Capuchin Claude d’Abbeville’s early-seventeenth
these illustrations were included in de Bry’s edition of this account in his Petit Voyages century descriptions of Tupi women, Laura Fishman has similarly noted how his
Given the fluidity of ethnic identity, the representation of the Brasilian man’s
moustache deserves further commentary. As noted by Londa Schiebinger, in the eigh-
teenth century the absence or presence of a beard was used to distinguish between the
races. Because they lacked this essential marker of masculinity and sexual virility in
European culture, some natural historians assigned Amerindians to a lower level of
humanity. 98 Already in Cardim’s description of the peoples of Brazil from the six-
teenth century, discussed above, the beard worn by the Topimanbae men was consid-
ered important enough to be listed among their essential characteristics. Wagener
also makes mention of the Brasilian man’s ‘sparse beard’ in the description that
accompanies his copy of Eckhout’s painting.99 Even his medium length, wavy, dark
brown hair is unusual for Amerindians, who are always described as having straight
black hair. To an even greater degree than Eckhout’s painting of the Brasilian woman,
this image freezes the Brasilian man halfway on his journey towards full assimilation
into Western culture. This is especially obvious when one contrasts his image with
Eckhout’s Tapuya man, who plays the traditional role of the Indian ‘savage’.
Eckhout’s Brasilianen fall entirely outside the visual tradition for New World
fig. 36 – Albert Eckhout, Tapuya Dance, oil on canvas, 172 x 295 cm. Indians. Eckhout responded to the situation by creating a new Indian type – the
Courtesy of the Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen. Brasilian – who existed only within the colonial context. Eckhout’s paintings may have
promoted the assimilation of the Brasilianen – naturalizing their existence and their
description of native women breastfeeding functioned as a critique of their European place within the Dutch world order as it existed in Recife and Mauritsstad. The fact
counterparts, many of whom engaged wet nurses for their children. 95 It is also diffi- that mamelucos, whose mothers were Amerindians and whose fathers were Euro-
cult to overlook similarities between this visual tradition and the one that developed peans, were an established presence in the colony suggests that Eckhout’s depiction
promoting breast-feeding as an appropriate maternal activity in eighteenth-century of an attractive and accessible Brasilian woman both reflected and reinforced the colo-
France.96 nial reality of sexual intercourse between various groups, and perhaps even functioned
Eckhout’s Brasilian man is not modeled on any known print, but his image is to encourage this type of behaviour. In contrast, Eckhout’s paintings of the Tapuya
nonetheless related to the generic masculine type for the ‘native’ man, whose univer- make no reference to cultural or sexual assimilation. These images are the direct heirs
sal attributes included a bow and arrows. In creating this image, Eckhout appears to to the sixteenth-century illustrations of Tupinamba cannibals in Staden, Thevet, and
have borrowed aspects of pose and muscle development from his life studies in Léry. But before beginning an analysis of these works of art, let us first turn to the
Kraków and Berlin of indigenous men in Brazil, now usually identified as members of term Tapuya and what it meant for contemporaries in Dutch Brazil.
the Tarairiu ethnic group. Comparing the Brasilian man’s body with the men in
Eckhout’s Tapuya Dance demonstrates further similarities (fig. 36). Nonetheless, his
obvious links to European culture, which include his shorts, knife, and facial hair, Tarairiu or Tapuya?
have placed him into a new category of Indian. Although the tendency today is to
emphasize skin colour as one of the primary external markers of ‘racial’ difference, Identifying just who the Tapuya were has long troubled scholars of South American
Harris has demonstrated that beginning in the late seventeenth century, Indians in the Indians. At the end of the nineteenth century, Paul Ehrenreich suggested that the
Andes were able to redefine their ethnicity as mestizo, not via miscegenation, but by Tapuya were a Gê-speaking people, probably either the Tarairyou or the Otschuca-
the adoption of Spanish dress and language, relocation into the cites, and their par- yana, although more recent scholarship has called this Gê connection into question.100
ticipation in certain types of economic activities, such as trade.97 It seems likely that Twentieth-century historians and anthropologists now caution against using the term
the same thing was occurring in Brazil at the same time. Tapuya, because it is a Tupinamba expression believed to have meant ‘people of the
strange tongue’,101 ‘enemies’,102 or ‘tribes of the interior’.103 Already in the 1960s, The reports made by WIC employees Elias Herckmans in 1639 and Jacob
anthropologist Robert Lowrie called Tapuya a pejorative and non-specific ‘blanket Rabb in 1642 are the most comprehensive descriptions of the Tapuyas produced in
term’ and recommended that it be eliminated from scientific usage, because it had Dutch Brazil, although de Laet’s Historie ofte iaerlyck Verhael (1644) also reproduces
been applied to many different Indians groups by hostile Tupinambas and European contemporary discussions of the Tapuya. Herckmans’s ‘Short description of the Tapuya
outsiders.104 way of life’ (Een corte beschrijvinge vant leven der Tapuyas) is included, along with his
Following this advice, scholars have turned away from using this label for comments about the Brasilianen, as part of a longer work on the captaincy of Paraiba.110
Eckhout’s Indians, from the two figures in the ethnographic portrait series, to the These reports circulated not only within the colony, but reached a wider European
Tapuya Dance, to almost all of the indigenous people depicted in his chalk studies. audience via Barlaeus and the ethnographic appendix added by de Laet to the end of
These figures are now labeled ‘Tarairiu’, which is what the indigenous group having the Historia (1648). Johan Rabb (also Rabe), so-called ‘director of the Tapuya’, lived
the greatest contact with the Dutch are reported to have called themselves.105 As noted near the Tarairiu and was employed by the Company to supervise them.111
above, application of this ‘scientific’ title has opened up Eckhout to additional criti- Similar to the report cited by de Laet above, Herckmans states that the Tapuyas
cism, because he includes what some scholars consider ‘ethnographically inaccurate’ are ‘divided into different nations’. He names four, but says that Tarairyou are the
details, such as the body parts held by the woman. Such an attack is made possible by Tapuyas best known to the Dutch.112 Herckmans then offers an ethnographic and visual
applying anachronistic standards to these works and is furthermore based on two analysis of the Tapuya as a group. According to him, they lead a ‘completely bestial
problematic assumptions: 1) that Eckhout’s images represent this specific group of and carefree life’.113 The men are tall, with brown skin, a sturdy build, a ‘big fat head’,
Tapuya and 2) that his figures are meant to be strictly truthful, disallowing the possi- and no beard.114 Their black hair is cut around their head to their ears, the rest hang-
bility that the objects depicted had symbolic or emblematic functions. ing to the neck, and they wear a green, black, or gray stone in a hole under their lip.115
Rather than being an attempt to accurately depict a specific New World ethnic Men who have proved their ‘manhood’ are distinguished by white bones that look like
group, it appears more likely that Eckhout’s intention was to represent the savage broken off pipe stems and protrude from each cheek.116 Both men and women go
Tapuya type as a counterpart to a Brasilian type. Certainly, written sources make the naked, although men wrap the penis with the nearby skin, tying it with a string: the
connection between the Tapuya and the Tarairiu, and there is a rich body of histori- arrangement is described as their ‘figleaf’. The women wear a covering of green leaves
cal materials that documents the relationship between the Dutch and this Indian over their pubic area and buttocks.117 In times of war and celebration, the men also
group.106 Contemporaries in the seventeenth century knew that Tapuya was a general wear feather decorations.118 They have no knowledge of God, but rather serve the
designation that did not refer to any single Indian nation, in the same way that they devil or evil spirits.119 Furthermore, Herckmans asserts that they practice endocanni-
recognized that there was more than one Tupinamba nation. As the historical title balism, consuming both still-born children and family members when they die.120
most frequently applied to the figures in Eckhout’s paintings and drawings, it is essen- Much of the information found here occurs in contemporary discussions of the
tial to reconstruct exactly what it meant for the Dutch in Brazil. Tapuya, including the works by Soler (1639), Wagener (ca. 1641), and Rabb (1642). It
During the early modern period, the label Tapuya (also Tapuia, Tapuÿa, tapooei- is clear from Rabb’s report that the Tapuya he describes are the Tarairiu, because their
jer, and Tapoye) was applied by the Dutch to non-Tupinamba Indians in Brazil. While leader is Jan de Wy (also Nhandúi), who is also mentioned by Herckmans as one of
Cardim was one of many Europeans to describe the Tupinambas, his 1584 report is the two rulers of the Tarairiu. Given Rabb’s close relationship with this nation because
one of the first to mention the Tapuya. Again following Cardim’s description of the of his position as ‘director of the Tapuya’, his report contains much of the same infor-
Indians in Brazil, de Laet’s Nieuwe wereld (1625) states that the Maraquites, who inhabit mation as Herckmans’s.121
the area between Pernambuco and Bahia, are called ‘Tapoyes’ or ‘wild people’ by other It is likely that contemporary ideas about the Tapuya in Dutch Brazil were
Indians.107 These Tapoyes are nomadic cannibals, lacking both religion and allies among based on contact with their Tarairiu allies, although it is important to note that the
the other Indians.108 In addition, de Laet notes that according to his Portuguese source term had been in use for more than fifty years before the Dutch colonized northeast-
(Cardim), seventy-six different types of Tapauias had been identified in Brazil, all ern Brazil. Furthermore, Herckmans, de Laet, and others apply the Tapuya label to
having different languages and customs. A description written by a Portuguese sugar Indians other than the Tarairiu. Even Marcgraf’s newly discovered 1639 report on a
planter in 1618 gives similar information, stating that the nomadic Tapuya lack ‘villages slaving expedition into the interior chronicles how a group of 250 ‘Brazilians’, fifteen
or regular dwellings’, ‘differ in speech’ from other Indians, and are widely feared.109 whites, and 150 ‘tapooeijers’ chased ‘wilde tapooeijers’ into the interior.122 Thus, while it
is true that all Tarairiu were Tapuyas, it cannot be assumed that all Tapuyas were thrower, and a black club (plate 3). The Tapuya man is both significantly taller and
Tarairiu. Removing the anthropological title Tarairiu frees the investigation of more substantial than the Tapuya woman and the rest of the figures in this series of
Eckhout’s images from a preoccupation with establishing an ethnohistorical reality paintings. He is over-life size in terms of height, and while the other figures in the
that has characterized many earlier assessments of his work. series take up approximately one-fourth of the width of the canvas, his body takes up
one-third. Indeed, his legs, especially his calves, appear too short for his enormous
torso. He wears a colourful headdress, with red, yellow, and blue feathers, and a feath-
Eckhout’s Tapuya Man and Woman er bustle is attached to his back by a thin string tied around his middle. His head is
painted more carefully than the rest of his body, with highlights reflecting off of his
The figures in Eckhout’s paintings share many similarities with the contemporary forehead and right cheekbone, and he looks towards the viewer with a serious, not
descriptions of the Tapuya discussed above, but this is not a simple case of images hostile, expression on his face. He wears a plug in his right ear lobe; long, thin, bone-
illustrating a text. Eckhout’s Tapuya man and woman were built up from in situ draw- like objects protrude like fangs next to his mouth; and a large, bright-green stone is
ings, which may depict the Tarairiu people, and references to earlier images of Indians, worn in a hole beneath his lower lip. His penis is wrapped and tied in a string in a
adopting aspects of the iconography of the ‘wild Tupinamba’ from the sixteenth cen- manner that is strongly resonant of Herckman’s description, and there is no evidence
tury. Indeed, although the title Tapuya brought with it a number of negative conno- of pubic hair. A dead green boa constrictor lies at his feet on the right, and a tarantu-
tations, including cannibalism, nudity, and lack of a ‘true’ religion, it is important to la approaches from the left.
note that exactly these same sorts of things were said of the Tupinamba when As with the Tapuya woman, tiny Amerindians can be seen in the background
Europeans first encountered them along the coast of Brazil in the sixteenth century. behind him. Here the ten male figures – possibly holding spears – dance in a circle,
Eckhout’s painting of a Tapuya woman is his most controversial image because while two figures sit, and another lies on the ground at the side.123 This scene is sim-
of its references to cannibalism (plate 2). This painting features a nearly nude ilar to Eckhout’s large Tapuya Dance composition where the figures dance by raising
woman with warm brown skin standing at the edge of a small stream. Her weight- one of their legs.124 A flowering vine running along the foreground of this canvas was
bearing left leg is on dry land and her right foot rests on a rock in middle of the small uncovered when the painting was last restored in the late 1970s. Removal of this over-
stream that runs at her feet. Described by Herckmans as typical of all Tapuya women, painting was probably a mistake, because Eckhout’s signature is painted on it.125 The
here her genitals and buttocks are covered by two small, tightly bound bunches of signature has now been isolated as a small rectangular island, the only place where the
leafy twigs – one in the front and one barely visible in the back – held in place by a overpainting was not removed.
thin cord that goes around her hips. She holds a longer bunch of twigs under her In 1965 Rüdiger Klessmann published a group of five drawings of Amerindians
breasts with her left hand, and on her feet she wears simple string sandals. Clutched by Eckhout, newly discovered in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz in
firmly in her right hand is a severed human hand, with ragged flesh, long gray nails, Berlin. At an early date this group had been separated from the rest of his Brazilian
and a protruding white bone, presumably from the same victim as the foot that sticks drawings in the Libri picturati, now in Kraków (see chapter 2).126 Most of these draw-
out of the basket she wears on her back. Her softly painted face, framed by black hair ings have been identified by twentieth-century scholars as depicting the Tarairiu peo-
that falls to her shoulders, glances towards the viewer, whom she contemplates in a ple, although one cannot know for certain whether this title is the correct one or not.
passive manner that contradicts the violence done to the human whose bloody limbs These images are closely related to Eckhout’s paintings, forming studies used for the
she carries. Her skin is covered by greenish patches, especially on her legs and below Tapuya man, the Tapuya woman, and the dance scene, and as such allow us to recon-
her left eye, but also evident on the severed hand she carries. She is framed on the struct Eckhout’s manner of working. One sketch displays a standing man with his
right by a tree from which long brown seed pods hang. A non-descript brown dog right leg raised like the men in the Tapuya Dance (figs. 36, 37). While the connection
with white paws displays a mouthful of sharp teeth as he drinks from the stream between this study and the central figure in the Tapuya Dance scene is clear, the fact
between her legs. Framed by the opening between her legs, tiny Amerindian figures that his torso is also the same as that of the Tapuya man has been overlooked. Both
– two groups of six figures with spears – can be seen in the deep background. men share the same three-quarter view and solid body build, although the position of
The spears carried by these tiny figures are echoed by those in the possession the legs, arms, and head do not match. Klessmann also points to the close resemblance
of the Tapuya woman’s male counterpart – whose weapons include four spears, a spear between the contrapposto pose of the woman in Eckhout’s drawing of a standing but
fig. 37 – Albert Eckhout, Indian man dancing, chalk on paper, 33.2 by 21.6 cm. fig. 38 – Albert Eckhout, Indian woman sitting, chalk on paper, 33.2 by 21.6 cm.
Courtesy of the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatsbibliothek Pressischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Courtesy of the Kupferstichkabinett, Staatsbibliothek Pressischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.
headless nude and the pose of the Tapuya woman in his painting. They also share the
same curve of breast and stomach, and their legs are positioned in the same way.
Klessmann overlooked the connection between Eckhout’s painting and the drawing
of a sitting woman holding a bunch of leafy twigs under her breast in left arm (fig. 38).
Eckhout seems to have used both the arm and head in conjunction with the other
drawing in making the final composition for the figure in this painting.
Despite the fact that the underlying form for the painting of the Tapuya woman
is based on drawings of Amerindian, possibly Tarairiu, women in Brazil, this is not a
portrait of one of them. This nude woman cannibal is meant to be seen in opposition
to the semi-clothed Brasilian woman, discussed above, who cares for her small child
in her role of the good native mother. Existing beside this visual tradition of the nur-
turing native mother, but quite opposite to it, is that of the savage woman warrior,
who has no children and instead carries weapons and body parts from her enemies.
While the leaves covering her genitals match the description in Herckmans’s text and
Eckhout’s life drawings, Eckhout includes body parts because he believed that Tapuya
Indians, based on contemporary descriptions, were cannibals. Whether or not the
accusation of cannibalism was true, all contemporary Dutch sources list it as one of
the main Tapuya characteristics.
Eckhout’s figure in this painting can be likened to the ‘savage woman’ warrior
type as displayed in Phillipe Galle’s America (1581-1600) and in this frontispiece from
the American volume of Johannes Blaeu’s Grand Atlas (fig. 39). Both of these images
display tall nude woman warriors with long spears, with their savagery and cannibal-
ism demonstrated by the severed heads at their feet. These images, including Eck-
hout’s Tapuya woman, are related to ideas about the Amazons, a mythic race of ‘rude
and savage’ women warriors believed by many, including André Thevet, to dwell in
the newly discovered ‘islands’.127 Although Eckhout’s Tapuya woman has no weapons,
the tiny armed figures in the wilderness behind her support a militaristic association.
These references to fighting and killing and the wild landscape behind the Tapuya
woman are a sharp contrast to the Brasilian woman’s submissive role before the peace-
ful plantation with European landholders at its centre. Baumunk has suggested that
the dog at the Tapuya woman’s feet could be an allusion to hunting, and as such does
not rule out a possible connection to Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt.128 It seems
more logical, however, that Eckhout intended this animal to reinforce her status as a
cannibal. Dog-headed cannibals and other ‘Marvels of the East’ populate early images
of the New World.129 As Lestringant notes, Europeans also made a linguistic link
between canis-caniba.130 But dogs are primarily associated with cannibals because of
their tendency to eat feces – cannibals, like dogs, cannot distinguish between proper
and improper food.131 Body parts, body painting, the dog, in addition to her full nudity,
demonstrate the Tapuya woman’s lack of civility to the viewer.
fig. 39 – America, hand-coloured engraving. Reproduced in Johannes Blaeu’s Grand Atlas (1662).
124 visions of savage paradise Courtesy of the Dartmouth University Library, Hanover.
Beyond general connections to the iconography of Amerindian cannibalism and
the ‘savage woman warrior’, Eckhout may have borrowed attributes from sixteenth-
century images of Tupinambas. For example, the basket she wears on her back, bound
to her head by a long band, resembles the one illustrated in chapter 30 of Thevet’s
Antarctique. Eckhout may also have seen Johannes Blaeu’s 1617 map of America with
an illustrated border, which includes a representation of two ‘Brazilian soldiers’. Here
the right figure wears the same kind of basket attached to his head.132 Their nudity,
weapons, and awkward but powerful bodies offer similarities beyond the basket to
Eckhout’s Tapuya woman.
Like the basket, body painting and staining are listed by Europeans, including
Staden, Thevet, and Léry, as characteristic of the indigenous peoples of Brazil,
although they are almost never reproduced in images.133 The earliest example dis-
playing such external skin decoration is from Staden’s Wahrhaftig Historia...in Neuen
Welt (1557), in which male Tupinamba warriors are covered with spots of paint or
feathers. To a much greater degree than Staden’s warriors, the spotting on the Tapuya
woman’s skin simply gives her a dirty and unattractive appearance, especially when
contrasted with the smooth, unmarred skin of the Brasilian woman. These painted
spots were uncovered in the last restoration of this work in the late 1970s. The paint-
ing must be examined in person to see the marks properly, which explains why schol-
ars have failed to mention them in earlier discussions of this painting.134 Although the
blotches covering her legs and arms, and even the severed human hand she carries,
appear greenish to the naked eye, the pigments present here are black, lead white, and
smalt, suggesting that the original appearance was closer to a bluish black.135 In six-
teenth-century texts, the Tupinamba were said to have used jennip to dye their legs fig. 40 – Tapuya Man and Tapuya Woman, engraving. Reproduced in Joan Niehoff,
Gedenkwaerdige Zee en Lantreize door der voormaemste landschappen van west en oostindien (1682).
black. The only copy of this work to reproduce her original body staining (and add it Courtesy of the Royal Library, The Hague.
to the Tapuya man) is Joan Niehoff’s Gedenkwaerdige Zee en Lantreize door der voor-
maemste landschappen van west en oostindien (1682) (fig. 40).136 Because the original ing a large group of dancing men, have also been interpreted as witches. Nonetheless,
spots have faded to such a large degree, it is useful to look at this print to get an idea of while the Dutch accused the Tapuya of ‘serving the devil or evil spirits’, they do not
the original effect. generally call them witches, although a connection to this group may have been
Scholars have also suggested that Eckhout further demonized his Tapuya implicit in the accusation.140 The charge of devil or demon worship is made so fre-
woman by showing her nude, thus making a connection to beliefs about witches and quently in contemporary descriptions of indigenous Americans that it seems problem-
witchcraft.137 Like the Tapuya woman, contemporary European images of witches atic to isolate Eckhout’s Tapuya woman or the female figures in the Tapuya Dance.141
show them as naked, dangerous figures. That Europeans made a connection with such Like devil worship and ignorance of god, nudity had been a fundamental characteris-
groups is demonstrated by Léry, who writes that the Tupinamba women of Brazil and tic of Brazilian Indians since the first descriptions were made of the Tupinamba at the
the witches of Europe ‘were guided by the same spirit of Satan’, although this associ- beginning of the sixteenth century. The contrasts between the Brasilian woman and
ation was not based on their nudity.138 In Part III of the Grands Voyages, de Bry repro- the Tapuya woman are clear enough without having to label the Tapuya woman an
duces an image of Tupinambas attacked by devilish figures, and Wagener asserts that ‘excessively aggressive’ witch.142
the Tapuya, in turn, ‘worship, serve, and adore the devil’. 139 The two female figures in
Eckhout’s Tapuya Dance, who stand on the side and cover their mouths while watch-
The Tapuya Man introduced by the European invaders and colonists since the beginning of the six-
teenth century. The Tarairiu may have modeled for the savage Tapuya of Eckhout’s
Both the Tapuya man and the Brasilian man have a similar body build and stand hold- paintings, but these images are not mirror reflections of this particular people. The
ing weapons in a three-quarter pose. Like their female companions, however, the dif- Brasilianen are acculturated Indians, sitting on the border of civility. Although they
ferences between the two could not be clearer (plates 3, 5). Again, it is not simply a are not yet welcomed into the company of the Europeans, they are already discon-
contrast of clothed and naked, but of Westernized versus ‘wild’. No sketches survive nected from their Indian heritage. The interpretation of grades of civility works well
by Eckhout for this figure, although other, similar images of Indian men in his Tapuya with Eckhout’s four paintings of Tapuya and Brasilian Indians. As addressed earlier,
Dance clearly draw upon his life drawings, now in the Misc. Cleyeri (plate 1; fig. 37).143 this hierarchy has also been applied to the rest of the pairs in the ethnographic por-
Despite Eckhout’s study of real Brazilian Indians, it is striking how closely the man’s trait series, which are said to embody three levels between savage and (more or less)
body and facial decoration match the description given by Herckmans, cited above. civilized. The problems with the expansion of this theory to these images will be
Because this painting is not a portrait of a particular man, Eckhout may have looked addressed in the next chapter, which discusses Eckhout’s representations of Africans,
to images like those illustrating Thevet’s Les Vrais Pourtraits et Vies des Hommes mulattos, and mestizos.
Illustres... (Paris, 1584). Here it is not Quoniambec, a sixteenth-century king of the
Tupinambas, who offers the clearest parallels, but rather Nacolabsou, king of the
Promontory of the Cannibals, whose two-part feather headdress and sharp and pro-
truding facial decorations offer the closest model for Eckhout’s Tapuya man. A con-
nection with this print would conveniently connect this painting to the Tapuya woman
and her references to cannibalism.
The large green stone in his chin is also mentioned in Herckmans’s report,
although it was also a standard feature in descriptions of the Tupinamba and was
reproduced in dozens of contemporary images of Brazilian Indians in general. His
club may also be related to descriptions of Tupinamba clubs, which were used to kill
prisoners before consumption and are frequently represented in sixteenth-century
images. A contemporary example is currently on display in the Nationalmuseet in
Copenhagen, perhaps given to the king by Johan Maurits with the paintings in
1654.144 Finally, the Tapuya man’s feather bustle is also a standard feature in images
of Tupinamba men in the books by Staden, Léry, and Thevet.
Eckhout’s Tapuya man, despite the use of life studies, appears to be an updat-
ed version of a sixteenth-century Tupinamba, while the Brasilian man has almost
entirely lost his connection to this past. The Brasilian man’s landscape is edenic, fruit-
ful, and carefully supervised by a subtle European presence. His weapons are not
threatening to the viewer. In contrast, the Tapuya man’s weapons are of a different
sort, with the spider and the bleeding snake in the foreground suggesting both the dif-
ference in foodstuffs between the two nations and reinforcing a sense of danger.145
Europeans are not welcome in this barbarous place, where naked Indians dance at the
edge of a forest.
Neither pair of Amerindians in this series of paintings was meant to be an exer-
cise in ethnographic accuracy. By the 1630s, none of the Indians encountered by the
Dutch in the captaincy of Pernambuco was truly ‘wild’ or untouched by the changes
chapter 5
Black, Brown, and Yellow

Eckhout’s Paintings of
Africans, Mestizos, and Mulattos 1
fig. 41 – Zacharias Wagener, Omem Negro, ca. 1641, watercolour on paper, in his Thierbuch.
Courtesy of the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Dresden.
he colonization of parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas
T by various European nations during the early modern period had many conse-
quences for the indigenous populations, not least of which was the birth of chil-
dren to non-European women and European men. A particularly complicated situation
developed in the Americas where Europeans, Africans, and indigenous peoples engaged
in interracial sexual activity. Enslaved African women were in no position to deny
their bodies to men of the ruling white minority, and European colonists, soldiers,
and traders had actively pursued sexual relations with indigenous women (many of
whom were also enslaved) from the beginning of the sixteenth century. In New Spain
(Mexico) in the eighteenth century, there were special names for dozens of different
ethnic groups and the people produced by mixtures between them. The same is true
of the Portuguese colonies in Brazil, where many of the racial terms developed in the
early modern period are still in use today.2 In the seventeenth century, however, the
main non-European ethnic groups recognized by the Dutch in Brazil were limited to
Brasilianen, Tapuyas, Africans, mulattos, and mamelucos. It is not a coincidence that
these groups are the ones represented in Eckhout’s ethnographic portrait series.
fig. 42 – Zacharias Wagener, Molher Negra, ca. 1641, watercolour on paper, in his Thierbuch.
Courtesy of the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Dresden. 131
As addressed in chapter 4, Eckhout’s status as one of the first trained European relations within the colonial discourse that they create. For Bhabha, it is a place of
painters in the New World has meant that interpretive emphasis has long been placed revolutionary power: ‘the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may
on his images of indigenous Americans. As a result, the other figures in his ethno- open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, not based on the exoticism
graphic series have been relatively understudied in comparison. His paintings of the of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation
African man and woman and the mameluca and the mulatto man are, nonetheless, of nature’s hybridity.’6
remarkable works without precedence in the history of art (plates 6-9). In the mid- In employing the term hybridity, I am also consciously invoking its conflicted
seventeenth century, there was no set iconography for mestizos or mulattos, and rep- nature, an aspect that is also present in Eckhout’s works of art. As addressed in detail
resentations of them are highly unusual despite their presence in every colonial city by Robert Young, hybridity as applied to human beings has its roots in the highly
and outpost. Early modern images of Africans are considerably more common, polemical imperial discourse of the nineteenth century on the mixing of the races.7
although Eckhout’s fascinating paintings of a black man and woman are unique in this Scientists and race theorists discouraged interracial sexual contact, arguing that the
genre of images. Due to the lack of scholarly attention, the status of these figures has offspring of such unions were (or would become) degenerate and infertile. Nonethe-
yet to be established: are they African nobles or New World slaves? To address these less, miscegenation was encouraged by others, some of whom had first-hand experi-
gaps in the literature, this chapter offers a detailed analysis of Eckhout’s images of ence in the tropics, as the only means of survival for colonies in such locations. As
Africans, mestizos, and mulattos. Building on the interpretation of his representations Young argues, ‘[t]heories of race were thus also covert theories of desire’.8 But even
of the Brasilianen and the Tapuyas in chapter 4, as well as the analysis put forth here, in this case, miscegenation had to be carefully monitored to prevent the anticipated
I will conclude with a reconsideration of Ernst van den Boogaart’s three-tiered colo- backward slide of the hybrids into the more primitive state associated with the non-
nialist hierarchy structured around degrees of ‘civility’. This interpretive model clear- white races. As the discussion here on Eckhout’s paintings of Africans, mulattos, and
ly requires some adjustment in order to properly account for Eckhout’s paintings of mestizos will demonstrate, earlier versions of these ideas were already in place in the
Africans and people of mixed racial background in the New World. In particular, the seventeenth century, although they had not yet found expression within a scientific
complexity as well as the importance of the representations of the Africans strongly framework.
suggests that they should be assigned their own level of civility.
Before beginning a detailed analysis, it is essential to point out that these paint-
ings exemplify, to a greater degree than Eckhout’s images of Indians, the complexity Africans, Africans in America, and African Americans
and hybridity of images produced in the colonial context. In its most basic form,
hybridity refers to the transcultural productions of the borderland or ‘contact zone’, Van den Boogaart has convincingly argued that blacks are included in this series of
as theorized by Mary Louise Pratt, which describes the negotiated space between cul- South American ‘national’ types because they represent people from the West African
tures.3 Homi Bhabha, whose work on hybridity and ambivalence are fundamental in coastal holdings of the WIC.9 As will be demonstrated below, Eckhout’s black figures
post-colonial studies, engages the idea of hybridity via what he calls the ‘Third Space are connected to the areas where the Dutch had cultivated the greatest number of
of Enunciation’, which he argues is responsible for the production of all cultural state- commercial contacts during the seventeenth century, namely Guinea (a historical
ments and systems.4 This theoretical space has its origins in linguistics and the ‘dis- term designating a large geographical area, today most closely identified with Ghana)
juncture between the subject of the proposition (énoncé) and the subject of enunciation, and Angola (similarly, a historical term for the area between Cameroon and the
which is not represented in the statement but which is the acknowledgement of its Congo river, covering areas of the Congo and its neighbouring countries).10 WIC
discursive embeddedness and address, its cultural positionality, its reference to a pre- troops had captured and established forts in these two areas of the West African coast
sent time and a specific place’.5 Bhabha’s Third Space is similarly rife with the possi- precisely because the Dutch needed a reliable source of black Africans for enslaved
bility of misinterpretation and contradiction, but it is also where culture is formed and labor on their Brazilian sugar plantations. As contemporary documents make clear,
the ostensibly stable identities (both of colonizer and colonized) are created. Here it sugar production was impossible without the labor of African slaves. Nonetheless,
is of particular importance that this Third Space is also where representations, such with their costly attributes and dignified bearing, Eckhout’s black man and woman
as Eckhout’s ethnographic portrait series, are produced. The ambivalent, hybrid cannot easily be categorized as slaves, nor do they form a typical pair of ethnographic
products of this Third Space have the power to challenge the foundation of the power portraits. Rather, these paintings have transcended these categories by speaking a
132 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 133

multi-layered language of trade, gift-giving, and political alliance to their contempo- cartographers in Amsterdam before enlisting in the WIC in 1634 and sailing for
rary audiences. These audiences included the Count and his court, other WIC offi- Brazil. His initial service as a common soldier eventually led to his appointment as
cials and leaders in Brazil, as well as West African ambassadors to the Dutch colony. chief notary and butler to Johan Maurits.16 He was also something of an artist, with
Eckhout’s black woman stands against a coastal landscape with palms and a professional training in drawing maps. As an intimate member of the Count’s house-
papaya tree, fishing Amerindians along the shoreline, and ships in the deep back- hold, Wagener had access to both Eckhout and Marcgraf, and the Thierbuch, his per-
ground (plate 6). Her attributes include an elaborate hat decorated with peacock sonal natural history of Brazil, reproduces images of people, animals, and plants after
feathers and a small white clay pipe tucked into the sash at her waist. The nude boy at each.17 It must be emphasized, however, that Wagener’s descriptions cannot be used
her side is presumably her son, although his skin colour is several shades lighter than as an infallible key to Eckhout’s paintings. Wagener’s descriptions were created to
his mother’s. A small bird perches on his left hand, and he points an ear of shucked accompany his copies, not the original paintings. As such it is important to keep in
corn towards his mother’s vagina.11 The double ropes of white pearls and red coral mind the fact that this man had his own ideas and prejudices regarding the various
beads curving around her neck echo the form of her full, exposed breasts. This ethnic groups present in Brazil.
emphasis on sexuality, fecundity, and prosperity is reinforced by her cornucopia-like For Wagener, blacks in Brazil are slaves; there are no other options in this New
basket, which overflows with tropical fruit. World environment. Wagener labels his copies of Eckhout’s man and woman ‘Omem
Similarly, the black man’s strength and virility are emphasized by his muscular Negro’ and ‘Molher Negra,’ borrowing from the Portuguese terms ‘homem negro’ (black
appearance and the phallic form of the palm tree on his left (plate 7).12 His attributes man) and ‘mulher negro’ (black woman) (figs. 41, 42).18 In the text accompanying his
include a ceremonial sword decorated with a large pink shell and a tuft of long yellow image of the man, Wagener clarifies their status: ‘These blacks are brought to Brazil
hair. Near the shells scattered at his feet, an elephant’s tusk lies on the ground and from Africa’, naming Guinea and Angola as the main points of origin.19 He claims that
curves out of the picture plane to the right. Like his female counterpart, his only article most are sold as slaves to the Portuguese, who treat them very badly. This poor treat-
of clothing is a piece of blue and white striped cloth, here wrapped tightly around his ment is, according to Wagener, partly the fault of the slaves themselves: ‘it is neces-
genitals.13 Other similarities include the coastal landscape, framed by a palm tree and sary to whip and humiliate these blacks if you want them to work... as they are very
flowering vines that wind across the ground. However, while the woman’s wax palm stubborn and obstinate by nature’.20 Wagener takes liberties with his copies, elimi-
tree and papaya are native to Brazil, his date palm is native to Western Africa, sug- nating the backgrounds, substituting a stump for a palm tree, and adding a shield
gesting that Eckhout’s black figures stand on different continents.14 behind his ‘Omem Negro’. His black figures are also stockier in build and generally less
In comparison to the large body of literature and documents addressing the elegant than the man and woman in Eckhout’s paintings, but it is difficult to say
indigenous peoples of Brazil, there are few sources – Dutch or otherwise – that give a whether this was done to make the figures less attractive or is simply the result of his
detailed discussion of the culture, or even appearance, of Africans and people of shortcomings as an artist. Other additions include a brand in the form of a crowned
African ancestry in Brazil in the seventeenth century. Fortunately, circa 1641 WIC M above the left breast of his ‘Negra’, apparently the monogram of Johan Maurits.21
employee Zacharias Wagener (1614-1668) made annotated copies of Eckhout’s paint- This detail was added because Wagener’s text describes the contemporary practice of
ings for his Thierbuch, which will serve as the starting point here. Whereas Wagener’s branding slaves in the colony. As he impassively states: ‘Our people, like the Portu-
descriptions of his copies of Eckhout’s Brasilianen and Tapuyas were based on other guese, recently decided it would be a good idea to put certain signs or marks on men,
sources and therefore warranted less attention in chapter 4, his discussion of the women, and children’.22
Africans, the mulatto man, and the mameluca woman (addressed in the second half of The fact that slaves of African ancestry were such a large and highly visible part
this chapter) are largely unique. Nonetheless, care must be taken with this rich but of the population in Dutch Brazil also suggests that this is an accurate category for the
problematic source. black man and woman in Eckhout’s paintings. In 1630, the beginning of the Dutch
Wagener eventually became governor of the Cape Colony for the Dutch West occupation of Pernambuco, it is estimated that there were 40,000 slaves living in that
India Company, but his beginnings are less impressive.15 The early years of Wage- province alone.23 And from 1630 to 1651, the Dutch imported an additional 26,286
ner’s life resemble those of Georg Marcgraf, the artist-naturalist at Johan Maurits’s Africans as slaves into the colony.24 From 1634 onwards, the WIC was actively
Brazilian court. Like Marcgraf, Wagener was German and left his home when he was involved in the importation of slaves into the Americas. As mentioned above, during
a very young man. Arriving in the Dutch Republic, he worked for the Blaeu family of the period of Dutch occupation, WIC officials and others present in Brazil repeatedly

state that slaves are essential for operating the sugar plantations, the heart of the colo-
nial economy. According to contemporary observer Pierre Moreau, one could never
import enough of them.25
Comparing Eckhout’s paintings to early modern representations of black slaves
in the New World nonetheless demonstrates that this identification is highly prob-
lematic. The man and woman in Eckhout’s paintings have little in common with the
anonymous men pictured in this 1594 image of African slaves working on a sugar
plantation in South America (fig. 43).26 Like the sixteenth-century images of Indians
discussed in chapters 3 and 4, these figures betray their reliance on the heroic nude of
antiquity. They were also made by European artists – in this case from the de Bry
family – who had, in all likelihood, very limited experience with Africans. As Elmer
Kolfin has argued, descriptions of New World Africans in the eighteenth century and
earlier generally focus on their productive capacity as slaves; they are labouring bodies
rather than ethnographic types.27 In such cases, their main attributes here are limited
to closely cropped hair and near nudity, which exposes their youthful, well-muscled
bodies. Most early modern images of slaves are in the form of prints, which begin to
consistently emphasize skin colour only in the eighteenth century. Images of African
slaves in the Americas made during the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries do not
include weapons or exotic and costly objects – such as the pearls, gold bracelets, and
ceremonial sword seen in Eckhout’s paintings.28
Historians believe that Brazilian slaves lived under especially harsh conditions
because of the climate and labor-intensive work on the sugar plantations and in the
mills.29 Wagener describes this miserable existence, from physical abuse to inadequate
food, and he illustrates it in this original drawing (fig. 44). Here we see pathetic, hud-
dled groups of naked Africans freshly arrived in Pernambuco and about to be sold at
the slave market.30 This highly unusual depiction is at odds with both Eckhout’s orig-
inal paintings and Wagener’s copies after them.31 Other original drawings of Africans
by Wagener include a representation of a slave dance and an image of slaves carrying
a Portuguese woman. These two watercolours are lively, amusing representations that
demonstrate greater interest in skin colour than the print by de Bry addressed above.
Nonetheless, the majority of Wagener’s drawings, like most images of black slaves in
Brazil from the seventeenth century, follow the iconography set out in the sixteenth
century. As best exemplifed in landscapes painted by Frans Post in Brazil, these
images most commonly depict de-individualized brown bodies, diligently laboring on
the colonized land and its sugar plantations or relaxing peacefully on the banks of its
rivers. In Frans Post’s 1637 View of Itamaraca from the Mauritshuis, the black slaves,
carrying a basket of fruit and tending a horse, are not foreign to the Brazilian land-
scape, but have been naturalized into it as the country’s new natives (fig. 45).32 They
have been stripped of any direct association with Africa and carry and wear no ethno-
fig. 43 – Theodor de Bry, African slaves working in a sugarmill, engraving.

136 visions of savage paradise Reproduced in Grand Voyages (1590-1634): part V (1594). Courtesy of the Royal Library, The Hague.
graphic attributes. Indeed, except for their darker skin and status as slaves, there is
often little to distinguish black slaves in Brazil from the Tupinamba men and women
(more properly called Brasilianen) in Frans Post’s drawings and paintings.33 Post’s
landscapes may have supported both the trade in slaves and the Dutch colonial pro-
ject more generally by making these figures seem natural and appropriate in the
Brazilian landscape.
In comparison to the images of New World slaves addressed above, Eckhout’s
fascination with physical and ethnographic detail is unique in the seventeenth century.
Dirk Valkenburg’s Slave Dance (1707-1709), which was painted in the Dutch colony
of Surinam, is similarly distanced from the dominant visual tradition (fig. 46). Like
Brazil, the economy of Surinam was based on agricultural exports, such as sugar, and
relied heavily on the labor of African slaves. Valkenburg’s small, but highly com-
pelling painting was created for an absentee plantation owner’s cabinet of curiosities
in Amsterdam. Here Valkenburg demonstrates an almost obsessive interest in docu-
menting the ethnicity of New World slaves, from the patterns of scarification present
on the skin of the new arrivals, to the shades of their gleaming brown skin, to their
fig. 44 – Zacharias Wagener, Pernambuco slave market, ca. 1641, watercolour on paper, in his Thierbuch.
different physiognomies. As Kolfin points out, this image displays the slaves at rest,
Courtesy of the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlung, Dresden. dancing, playing drums, and drinking in a stereotypically carefree manner that was
often ascribed to Africans.34 Here, as in Wagener’s scene of slave revelry, signs of
their enslaved state are absent. The slaves work neither in the fields nor in the sugar
mills; furthermore, no white colonists are present. The works produced by both
Valkenburg and his predecessor Eckhout emphasize the external appearance and
physical characteristics of people of African origin. Each artist created paintings on
commission for an elite patron, and it is clear that these paintings had a higher value
and a different function than printed images of similar subjects, which addressed a
much broader public. While the specific needs of the colonial governor and the sugar
plantation owner were undoubtedly different, both Eckhout and Valkenburg created
paintings that reproduced specific ethnographic details and represented the larger
interests – economic and otherwise – of their patrons in the New World. Yet Eck-
hout’s work is even more radical than Valkenburg’s in establishing the dignity and
desirability of the blacks he portrays. He does this, in part, by elevating their status
and emphasizing their African origins.
In his 1938 monograph on Eckhout, Thomas Thomsen, then director of the
ethnographic department of the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen, asserted that Eck-
hout’s paintings were portraits of Ashanti nobles from the Gold Coast of Guinea (pre-
sent-day Ghana).35 According to Thomsen, these nobles, identified as such because of
their costly attributes, were brought back to Brazil as the result of the 1637 Dutch con-
quest of the Portuguese fort at Elmina, at that time the most important site of trade on
the Gold Coast.36 While there is no documentary evidence to support this assertion,
fig. 45 – Frans Post, View of Itamaraca, 1637, oil on canvas, 63.5 x 89.5.
Courtesy of the The Mauritshuis, The Hague.
black, brown, and yellow 139
scholars nonetheless agree on a West African provenance. Eckhout’s black man and
woman are recognizably African – it is not simply their skin colour, but also his spears,
sword, and elephant tusk, her hat, basket, and red coral beads, and the African bird
held by the child, which align these representations with the allegorical and ethno-
graphic images of Africans found in costume books, on maps, and in travel accounts.
It is likely that Eckhout was familiar with Pieter de Marees’s 1602 Beschrijvinge
ende historische verhael vant Gout Koninckrijk van Gunea (Description of the gold coast of
Guinea).37 De Marees’s account of a Dutch voyage to West Africa is one of the earliest
and most important European descriptions of the Gold Coast and its people, an area
that was of great importance to European, and especially Dutch, traders.38 During the
seventeenth century, the majority of gold imported into the Dutch Republic came
from the Gold Coast of Guinea, and it was also a key area for the trade in slaves.39 In
addition to its treatment of religion and customs, de Marees’s book discusses and
illustrates Africans from various areas and social classes, from a prostitute whose skin
shows special patterns of facial scarification, to a linen-robed and dignified noble-
man.40 The images in this text are part of an established ethnographic tradition for
representing Africans. An early example is this woodcut after a print by German artist
Hans Burgkmair illustrating an account of a voyage to India (1506-1507). This book,
which was published by Balthasar Springer in 1509, included Burgkmair’s illustration
of a man, woman, and child from Guinea, which was copied by an anonymous artist
for the illustration seen here (fig. 47). This rather generic image of a ‘native’ nuclear
family is, again, quite typical of ethnographic representations made in the sixteenth
century, in which details of hair, ornament, and costume are emphasized, but skin
colour has little importance.
Eckhout’s paintings of blacks in the Copenhagen series, especially his repre-
sentation of the man, draw upon this visual tradition by borrowing aspects of de
Marees’s illustration of the inhabitants of Capo Lopo Gonsalves or Cape Lopez, a
source that has, until now, eluded scholarly attention (fig. 48).41 A half-nude but jew-
eled woman and a small child occupy the center of this image, framed by a man on
either side. She may be the companion of the man on the right, who wears a loincloth
and belt and holds both a spear and an elephant tusk.42 This man, described by de
Marees as a trader with foreigners, is of lower status than the fully-clothed nobleman
in his fur hat on the left. Yet the trader is clearly of higher status than the slaves in the
background, who are shown without any clothing, weapons, or ornaments. The fig-
ures in this image, which are framed by a palm tree on the right, may have been a
direct inspiration for Eckhout’s paintings of the black man and woman.43 Earlier in
the text, de Marees even discusses weapons made by the Africans along the Gold
fig. 46 – Dirk Valkenburg, Slave Dance, ca. 1707, oil on canvas, 58 x 46.5 cm. Coast, and he specifically mentions a large sword with a ‘fish’ skin scabbard decorated
Courtesy of the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. by a large red shell. This description is almost a perfect match for the ceremonial

fig. 48 – Les habitans de Cabo lopo gonsalves (Inhabitants of Capo Lopo Gonsalves), engraving.
Reproduced in Pieter de Marees, Beschrijvinge ... vant Gout Koninckrijk van Gunea (1602).
Courtesy of the Royal Library, The Hague.
sword with the ray skin scabbard decorated with a red oyster shell that is held by the
man in Eckhout’s painting.44 Scholars have identified this sword as Akan, from the
Gold Coast of Guinea.45
As discussed in chapter 3, de Marees’s illustrations were made by artists in
Europe, and they are based on idealized European models, just like the images of
slaves illustrating de Bry’s edition of Benzoni in his Grands Voyages. In contrast,
Eckhout was in Brazil and accordingly had the opportunity to closely observe people
of African ancestry. The body of his black man has the same athletic build as the fig-
ures in the de Marees’s illustrations, but the care and detail used in painting his face
suggest that Eckhout employed a model from among the slaves or freed blacks in
Dutch Brazil.46 He created a West African setting by including a date palm tree, shells
from the Atlantic coast, and an elephant tusk, all standard in illustrations of Africans,
although the shells and tusk show the specificity of first-hand knowledge.47 The accu-
rate representation of African weapons suggests that Eckhout’s black man is not sim-
ply a generic African type or even a West African type. Rather Eckhout has created an
ethnographic portrait of a man from Guinea. As depicted, however, Eckhout’s African
man falls outside of de Marees’s categories; he wears a loin cloth like the merchants
fig. 47 – After Hans Burgkmair, Man, Woman, and Child from Guinea, woodcut.
Reproduced in Die reyse van Lissebone (1508). Courtesy of the British Library, London. black, brown, and yellow 143
and traders illustrated in de Marees’s text, but his impressive sword, discussed below, Africa are represented as beautiful, exotic women kneeling in homage to the Emperor,
could only have been the possession of a nobleman or leader. Furthermore, his hair- who stands in for the continent of Europe. Africa, shown with darker skin than the
style is not usual in images of Africans or New World slaves during the early modern rest, holds red coral in one hand and offers a bowl of coins, a reference to African
period. His hair, which is worn in soft curls over his ears, strongly resembles the hair- gold, in her other. A crocodile peeks around from behind her, and her Oriental tur-
style of the Brasilian man, another figure in Eckhout’s series whose protracted contact ban is decorated with feathers from a bird of paradise.54
with Europeans is evident in his clothing as well as his hairstyle.48 The first illustrated edition of Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603), a highly influen-
In 1612, the Dutch built Fort Nassau at Mouree, their first permanent settle- tial artists’ guide to emblematic representations, includes a simple representation of
ment along the Gold Coast of Guinea. In 1637, Johan Maurits directed the WIC’s the female personification of Africa. She displays her most important attributes as
successful conquest of the Portuguese castle and trading post of Elmina, the center of described by Ripa, including a cornucopia filled with wheat, a lion, snakes, and a scor-
trade along the Gold Coast. This, in addition to the WIC’s capture of Fort Saint pion. While the text describes her as an almost nude black woman with curly hair and
Anthony at Axim in 1642, resulted in closer trade relationships between the Dutch coral jewellery, the illustration ignores these details. In a 1644 Dutch edition of
and various African groups along the coast of Guinea and permanently ended Iconologia, the artist has more closely followed Ripa’s description of Africa’s appear-
Portuguese dominance in this region of Africa. It is possible that the sword repre- ance, emphasizing her dark skin colour and curly hair, and reducing her clothing to a
sented in Eckhout’s painting was a gift given to Johan Maurits by his African allies in short skirt, which leaves her breasts exposed (fig. 49).55 Eckhout’s black woman,
Guinea during a contractual negotiation, with the tusk symbolizing the important although displaying more ethnographic detail, is much like this contemporary Dutch
trade in ivory from this area.49 The African man’s Akan sword and spears closely illustration of Africa, who wears a coral necklace of large round beads and carries a
resemble weapons in the collection of the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen, which basket overflowing with fruit in place of the traditional cornucopia. In Eckhout’s
were probably given to King Frederik III of Denmark by Johan Maurits in 1654. This painting, however, there is additional pictorial emphasis on fecundity and sexuality,
gift also included Eckhout’s ethnographic portraits.50 most obviously demonstrated by the ear of corn pointed towards the woman’s vagina.
The representation of these weapons need not suggest that the man depicted in According to early modern Europeans, the continent of Africa and its native
the painting is simply a warrior, as some authors have assumed.51 In de Marees’s animals were thought to be extremely fertile, while Africa’s peoples were generally
descriptions, and in most ethnographic images, men carry weapons of all sorts, which described as oversexed.56 Legends reproduced by Johannes Leo Africanus and others,
often signal their rank and position. Indeed, the Akan sword in its original African con- which were transmitted through travel accounts, prints, and atlases, emphasized the
text would have been the possession of a man of high or noble rank, whose costume sexual voracity of ‘Negroe’ women and even told of animals commingling at water-
would have been considerably more elaborate than a simple loincloth.52 Eckhout surely holes and propagating a variety of bizarre new species.57 According to Ripa, because
meant this man to be identified as an African trader from the Gold Coast of Guinea, of their high rate of fertility, crocodiles were singled out as a symbol of Lussuria (lust)
like the man in the de Marees illustration. The fact that Wagener identifies him as a by the Egyptians. Thus, the personification of Lussuria, as described by Ripa, is a nude
‘Moor from Guinea’ suggests that his specific national origin was clear to contempo- woman with curly hair holding a bird and sitting on a crocodile.58 As seen in
rary observers in Brazil. Nonetheless, later viewers in Europe would fail to appreciate Francken’s painting mentioned above, a crocodile is often included as Africa’s primary
the geographic specificity of this representation and would simply label him ‘African’.53 animal companion and main attribute; not every image followed the Ripa prototype,
Eckhout’s painting of a black woman may also be compared to the woman which favoured elephants and scorpions.59 Examples from this competing tradition
depicted among the inhabitants of Cape Lopez in the de Marees illustration. The include an engraving of Africa by Adriaen Collaert after a design by Marten de Vos
women in both images have exposed breasts, wear elaborate jewellery and a short (ca. 1589), in which a nude woman sits on a crocodile and displays her nude body to
skirt, and are accompanied by a nude male child. Like Eckhout’s Brasilian woman, the viewer in a provocative manner.60 Similarly, in Crispijn de Passe the Elder’s
these figures fall into the category of the good native mother, discussed in chapter 4. engraving of the same subject, Africa, jeweled but nude, sits on a crocodile-like lizard
In the painting, the black woman’s attributes also connect her to the iconography of and is offered bits of coral by an appropriately leering satyr seated on a crocodile.61
Africa as one of the four parts of the world, most frequently personified by women. The combination of a nude woman with a crocodile provides a link between
A representative image is Frans Francken II’s Allegory on the Abdication of Emperor Lussuria and Africa, illustrating contemporary European stereotypes about African
Charles V (1636) in the Rijksmuseum, in which the continents of America, Asia, and women, which emphasized their dangerous nature and easy sexuality. While Eckhout’s

painting more closely follows the Ripa prototype, both visual traditions for the per-
sonification of Africa were predicated on the assumption that African women were
promiscuous by nature. This stereotype was reinforced by travel accounts, such as the
Leo Africanus’s account or de Marees’s description, both mentioned above. 62 In de
Marees’s work he gives the following description of the women of Cabo Lopo Gon-
salves, whose image may have influenced Eckhout: ‘The Womenfolk are also very
much inclined to unchastity and whoredom; in particular they like to fornicate with a
foreigner, which they consider a great honor... a man will present his Wives to for-
eigners who come there.’ 63
Given the emphasis on sexuality present in the early modern discourse on
Africans, it is possible that Eckhout sought out images of Venus upon which to model
his figure of an African woman in the New World. Hendrick Goltzius engraved an
image of Venus ca. 1590, in which a nude Cupid, Venus’s son, offers his mother an
ear of corn.64 Cupid’s gesture in this engraving is less obviously phallic than that of
the young boy in Eckhout’s painting; he offers his mother the corn instead of using it
to point between her legs. Ears of corn, in addition to sheaves of wheat and cornu-
copias, are often also associated with Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. Venus
and Ceres are linked in images, such as Goltzius’s, which illustrate the saying:
‘Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus Freezes’. In this poetic and visual tradition, food
and wine are essential for igniting the passions; without them physical love will not be
consummated, and Venus will ‘freeze’.65 The overlapping boundaries between the dif-
ferent iconographical traditions referenced by Eckhout’s painting bring us back again
to Ripa’s Africa from 1603, whose wheat and cornucopia are matched by those of the
goddess Ceres.
The discussion above has outlined the areas of correspondence between the fig-
ures in Eckhout’s paintings and a variety of different visual traditions, especially con-
temporary images in travel accounts and representations of the personification of
Africa. It is now time to turn to a more specific analysis of the objects and attributes
held and worn by Eckhout’s man and woman, now more properly termed Africans.
Eckhout’s Africans wear clothing of the same striped cloth, yet the artifacts they hold
and wear originate in different parts of western Africa. While these paintings may
have faced each other from across the hall in Vrijburg, as discussed in chapter 6, they
do not form a matched ethnographic pair like the Tapuyas or the Brasilianen. They are
both Africans, but one represents Guinea and the other Angola; each belongs to a dif-
ferent African nation. Her basket is Bakongo, produced around the mouth of the
Congo River, while his sword is Akan from Guinea.66 It is also likely that her hat was
produced in the area around Sonho, near the kingdom of the Congo, in what is now
fig. 49 – Africa, woodcut. Reproduced in Cesara Ripa, Iconologia of Uijtbeeldinghen des Verstandst van the Congo and its neighbouring countries.67 The hat is decorated with peacock feath-
Cesare Ripa van Peruigien (1644). Courtesy of the Art History Library, Leiden University, Leiden. ers, which were objects of trade in this region. Although no similar hats have survived,

the presence of peacocks and the use of peacock feathers for headdresses are attested Her cultural identity, in particular, is formed through the deliberate intermingling of
to by Fillipo Pigafetta in his 1591 book (based on the account of Portuguese traveller these various attributes. For example, her African basket is filled with tropical fruits
Duarte Lopez) on the Kingdom of the Congo.68 grown in Brazil, and a European white clay pipe is tucked into the waist of her striped
When the quality and number of slaves imported from Guinea proved inade- African skirt.76 The coral beads around her neck and her hat woven from raffia palm
quate, the Dutch moved southwards, and in 1641 the WIC conquered Luanda in signal an African provenance, but her pearl earrings with red bows and pearl necklace
Angola, the most important site for the West African slave trade.69 Competing African are of a type worn by middleclass women in contemporary Dutch paintings.77 Similarly,
potentates from this region, such as the King of the Congo and the Count of Sonho, her son signals his dual nationality by holding a cob of corn, indigenous to the Ameri-
who were wealthy because of this trade in human beings, sent ambassadors to both cas, in his right hand and an African love bird in his left.78
Dutch Brazil and the court of Frederik Hendrik in The Hague in the years that fol- The main figures in these paintings undermine the very idea of fixed ethnic
lowed. Lists of the gifts exchanged between these ambassadors and the Dutch in boundaries, whose fluidity becomes even more evident in Eckhout’s paintings of the
Brazil mention many rich and costly items, and documents attest to the importance mulatto man and the mameluca. Even if Eckhout had been unable to distinguish
the Dutch attached to this exchange as a way of establishing and cementing relation- between what was authentically African versus indigenous American, rather than lim-
ships with their African allies.70 Gifts offered to Johan Maurits by the WIC’s Congo iting this intermixing of attributes to a display of ‘exoticism’, it more importantly
allies included silver platters and other inanimate objects, and in 1642 also numbered shows that these are colonial works of art. Unlike many European artists, who created
two hundred African slaves.71 Because Eckhout’s paintings of Africans are dated 1641, a mixture of unsuitable attributes in order to make their subjects appear more exotic,
her basket and hat may represent objects acquired during the attack on and subse- Eckhout made this mixture of European, American, and Indian appear natural and
quent occupation of Luanda. appropriate. This image promoted the evolution of the African woman to American
This framework of conquest and slavery becomes especially important when slave, much in the same way that Eckhout’s paintings of the Brasilianen made their
one realizes that Eckhout’s African woman stands against an identifiably Brazilian colonized status integral to their ethnic identity.
coastline, although her most prominent attributes connect her to Africa. The African This complex painting of a woman and her child also stands apart because it is
man is the only figure in the series not pictured on South American soil, but the one of only two paintings in the series for which studies for the main figure survive.79
African woman is the only figure depicted on non-native soil. Unlike the African date Examination of these studies provides additional evidence that Eckhout carefully con-
palm that frames the man and ‘demonstrates’ his African location to the viewer, the structed the figure of the African woman using a variety of sources. Among the hun-
large wax palm tree on her right and the papayas behind her are indigenous to South dreds of drawings attributed to Eckhout from Brazil are a number of figure studies,
America.72 Furthermore, close inspection of the painting even reveals a group of including a representation of a black woman in native African dress and a lighter-
Brasilianen fishing along the shoreline in the deep background on the right. This skinned woman of uncertain origin standing alone on a beach (figs. 50, 51).80 Both of
vignette can also be found on Georg Marcgraf’s 1647 map of Pernambuco in Brazil, these images are painted in oils on paper. The first image, whose connection to this
although the figures there are black slaves.73 It is also possible that the pipe she wears painting has been unnoticed until now, belongs to a series of five representations of
at her waist signals her location as well as her ethnicity. Beginning in the seventeenth Africans, ostensibly members of the Congo’s Christian elite because of their clothing
century, blacks in the New World are often shown with pipes, which become one of and the crosses and rosary beads most of them wear.81 These large images, all approx-
their main attributes. Eckhout’s contemporaries Post and Wagener both display pipes imately 30 by 50 cm, are closer to costume studies than portraits. In contrast, the
prominently in images of black slaves in Brazil.74 Futhermore, a contemporary con- woman in the smaller study, measuring about 36 by 24 cm, has a much more carefully
nection between smoking and a debauched lifestyle, especially for women, makes this painted face, complete with an intensely sullen facial expression, suggesting that this
detail consistent with the emphasis on Africans and sexuality addressed above.75 is a portrait of a now anonymous woman in Dutch Brazil.82
Although carefully rendered artifacts are generally used to demonstrate the To create the final image for his painting, Eckhout took the pearl and coral jew-
‘authenticity’ of the ethnographic portrait, here, in a rather remarkable manner, they elry, dark skin colour, and muscular physique from the large costume study. And from
instead highlight the African woman’s artificiality and hybridity. In Eckhout’s paint- the small portrait, he took her head and face (with a somewhat modified expression),
ing, the primary attributes of the main figure and her son are African, but they wear in addition to the simple striped skirt, coastal backdrop, and bent arm. The ethnicity
and carry other ornaments and objects that are recognizably European or American. of this mysterious figure on the beach is unclear; her hair and features suggest African

fig. 50 – Albert Eckhout, Woman on Beach, ca. 1641, oil on paper, 35.5 x 24 cm. fig. 51 – Albert Eckhout, African Woman, ca. 1641, oil on paper, 50 x 31.1 cm.
Theatrum vol. III, f. 21. Courtesy of the Jagiellon University Library, Kraków. Theatrum vol. III, f. 11. Courtesy of the Jagiellon University Library, Kraków.
ancestry, but the pale greenish object she holds in her right hand cannot be identi- beach in the drawing, matches that of Eckhout’s Indians. Eckhout may have been
fied.83 The confusion in categorizing this figure – as slave, African, or even Indian – familiar with contemporary beliefs concerning the blackness of African skin. One pop-
is demonstrated by the handwritten annotation labeling her a ‘Tapuyarum mulier’ ular theory held that Africans were born with light skin, which darkened over time
(Tapuya woman), which was added above her figure in the late seventeenth century by because of exposure to the sun.90 For example, concerning black Africans in Guinea,
German physician Christopher Mentzel.84 In the nineteenth century, ethnographer de Marees states they ‘are not completely black at their birth, but reddish like
Paul Ehrenreich instead argued that she was Tupinamba, while others scholars con- Brazilians; yet they gradually become black’.91 Thus one would expect a black ‘Creole’
tinued to reproduce the label ‘Tapuyaum mulier’ without question.85 Given the warm child born and raised in South America to have lighter skin than his mother, who had
brown colour of her skin, which matches that of the Indians in Eckhout’s other paint- been exposed to the burning sun of Africa.92 Regardless of the child’s ethnicity, his
ings, and the fact that her stance is similar to that of the Tapuya woman, such an iden- presence is more than a sign of his mother’s past sexual encounters. More significantly,
tification is understandable.86 he represents her ability to produce children in the New World. This aspect repre-
Mason has recently suggested that the figure in this sketch, which he calls a sents an unfulfilled desire of the colonial administration; statistics from the eighteenth
‘Negro woman’, is intentionally ambiguous, allowing Eckhout to use it as a model for century suggest that slaves working on the sugar plantations in Brazil had the highest
paintings as diverse as the Tapuya woman and the African woman, thus demonstrat- death rate and the lowest fertility rates for enslaved peoples in the Americas, and
ing the ‘indeterminacy’ and interchangeability of the ‘exotic’ genre.87 Mason argues given the WIC’s importation of large numbers of slaves during Johan Maurits’s gov-
that ‘the basic structure of the human figure, the right arm bent at the elbow to sup- ernorship, it is likely that they had similar problems. Instead of reproduction provid-
port an object, applies to five of the eight large vertical paintings’.88 While this obser- ing the necessary supply of enslaved African labor, it was common for planters to
vation is correct, there is no proof that this figure was used as a basic outline for the work their slaves to death and purchase new ones when their numbers dwindled.93
rest of the images. Versions of this same representational type also occur in costume While the purpose of the colonial enterprise was to know and understand (and
books and travel accounts, like that of Pieter de Marees discussed above. Further- often denigrate) subject peoples in order to better rule them, Eckhout’s painting of
more, the presence in Berlin of two drawings (discussed in chapter 4) by Eckhout that the African woman demonstrates additional desires. She is like the ‘Sable Venus’ who
are clearly studies for his painting of the Tapuya woman suggests that there are only travels from Africa to Jamaica in Issac Teale’s poem ‘Sable Venus; An Ode’ (1765). In
superficial similarities between this ethnographic portrait of an Indian woman and the Teale’s poem, his ‘sable queen of love’ dazzles her male audience with her beautiful
figure on the beach in Eckhout’s small oil study. face and body.94 But in Eckhout’s painting, the African woman’s muscled body does
One aspect that has not been discussed regarding the mysterious woman in this not simply guarantee pleasure, but also labour and profits. The body of Eckhout’s
drawing is the fact that her skin colour matches that of the young boy in Eckhout’s African woman is like the basket she holds, African in origin, but bearing fruit that is
painting of the African woman. Like the woman on the beach in the oil study, the sta- South American. It is not by chance that Eckhout’s blacks come from Guinea and
tus of the child in Eckhout’s painting is similarly fraught with uncertainty. The child Angola, the most important areas of WIC trade in African slaves and gold, both rep-
largely plays a supporting role in this work of art by focusing the viewer’s eyes even resenting immensely valuable imports into the Americas and Europe. In this pair the
more closely on his mother. For the last twenty years many scholars have assumed man from Guinea is the trader with foreigners, representing both the geographical
that the child’s light skin colour means that he is mixed ‘racially’, most frequently sug- region of interest and the economic relationship on both sides of the Atlantic.
gesting that his father is a white European, with this aspect bringing additional atten- Eckhout places him within an appropriately African setting in order to make it clear
tion to his mother’s sexuality. As Mason argues: ‘The firm, bared breasts and the short to the viewer that the man depicted is not a slave. In contrast, the African woman
skirt convey an erotic invitation that is confirmed rather than denied by the presence stands on Brazilian soil, although she wears and carries Bakongo artifacts. She repre-
of the half-blood child, who presumably serves as a reminder of the past sexual activ- sents both the geographical region of Angola and the most important commodity
ities of his mother.’89 While the numbers of forced and coerced sexual encounters traded there – the millions of human beings who were shipped as slaves to the New
between Europeans and female slaves meant that having a ‘half-blood’ child was not World until the abolition of slavery in the late nineteenth century. In a less con-
an uncommon event for a woman of African ancestry in Brazil, Eckhout may have frontational manner than Wagener, who literally branded his copies of Eckhout’s
intended a different interpretation. First, the skin colour of the boy is much darker Africans as slaves, Eckhout alludes to the transition into slavery by depicting an
than Eckhout’s mulatto man. In fact, his skin colour, like that of the woman on the African woman in coastal Brazil. In this idealized version, her body has been grafted,

like a botanical hybrid, onto a new landscape.95 Her child, now properly termed Afri- and their colonial possessions to classify various peoples – often slaves and those of
can-American, is the new creation of this fruitful mixing of African woman and New mixed racial background – on the basis of the colour of their skin.100 As Jack Forbes
World location. He, like the black slaves in Post’s Brazilian paintings, is the new notes in his study of racial and colour terms, mulatto was applied to those who were
native who will eventually displace the Amerindian population. an intermediate colour – neither black nor white – over time coming to mean a person
whose mother was black and whose father was European.101 Another early term that
was used interchangeably with mulatto was mulacken. A 1639 French-Spanish-Dutch
Brazilian Mestizos and Mulattos dictionary defines mestizo and mulatto in the same way; each is a ‘half Mooren ghe-
boren van eenen witten en eene swerte.../moulack’ (half moor, born of a white man
The cross between a Portuguese man and an Indian woman produces and a black woman/a mulacken). 102 In the 1596 Dutch translation of the Italian Filippo
mamelucos; and with black women produces mulattos. These two class- Pigafetta’s book on the Congo, the children born of African women and Portuguese
es are of inferior people. Vicente Joachim Soler, Cort ende sonderlingh men are also called ‘Mulacken’.103 The author is not interested in describing the char-
verhael Van eenen Brief van Monsieur Soler (Brief and Curious Report of acter of these individuals, only the colour of their skin and the nationality of their par-
Some Peculiarities of Brazil), 1639.96 ents. The chapter begins with a question about the skin colour of these children: are
they ‘black, white or yellow’? As a way of refuting those who believe that black skin is
Scholars believe that the Portuguese, above all other Europeans, most enthusiastically the result of exposure to the sun, he notes that these children are not black, but ‘trecken
embraced miscegenation as a way of populating their colonies both along the western meer op’t witte’ (are closer to white), despite their African location.104
coast of Africa and in Brazil.97 Dutch colonists in Brazil, however, were certainly no In the ethnographic section added by de Laet to the Historia, mulattos are again
strangers to sexual liaisons with African and indigenous women.98 In Brazil, the cre- defined as the offspring of a European man and an ‘Ethiopian’ woman, Ethiopian
ation of a mulatto and mestizo class was aided by the fact that there were large groups being a term used by many Europeans to designate black Africans during this period.
of unmarried European men – colonists, soldiers, and WIC employees – but almost In his 1647 history of Dutch Brazil, Barlaeus calls them ‘half blacks’, noting that
no European women. In Eckhout’s painting of the African woman, a blurring of the ‘Mulatten’ is the term used by the Spanish.105 Other contemporary Dutch works that
boundaries, both national and sexual, was already present, but in his images of the discuss mulattos include Pieter de Marees’s 1602 account of the Gold Coast of
mulatto man and the mameluca, this process of cultural and ethnic hybridization is Guinea. In addition to the image of peoples from Cape Lopez, addressed above in
even more pronounced (plates 8, 9). Whether or not the condition of being ‘mixed’ conjunction with Eckhout’s paintings of Africans, this book includes one of the earliest
made one universally despised or gave one a superior status over the other non- representations of a person of mixed African/European descent. In a plate illustrating
European peoples in Brazil, there is no doubt that mamelucos and mulattos occupied chapter 7, ‘How the women comport themselves and how they dress’, the ‘Melato’
a highly contested space between Africans, Indians, and Europeans in seventeenth- stands on the left next to three other women (fig. 52). De Marees states:
century Dutch Brazil. Such people embodied that tenuous, and clearly permeable,
physical and sexual border between the colonized and the colonizer. But before A is a Portuguese woman living in the Castle d’Mina [Elmina], half
addressing how ideas and prejudices in colonial Dutch Brazil shaped the creation of black, half white and yellowish: such women are called Melato and most
these paintings, it is important to first determine what contemporaries in Europe and keep them as wives, because white women do not thrive much there.
the New World meant when they employed terms like mulatto or mameluco. They dress very nicely and have many Paternoster and other Beads on
their bodies. They cut the Hair on their heads very short, like the men,
thinking that it becomes them.106
Mulatto/Mulacken
The Melato is ‘kept’ as a wife, although she is more likely to have been a concubine or
Given their proximity to Africa and their long-standing ties with that continent, it is slave. Her dress is more elaborate and covers more of her body than the clothing of
likely that the Portuguese and the Spanish were the first to set mulattos apart as a sep- the other women, but her right breast is exposed and she has bare feet. Either one of
arate group.99 By the sixteenth century, the term mulato was used in Portugal, Spain, these last two characteristics would have demonstrated to contemporaries that she was

This caption also brings up the important point that the vast majority of all mulattos
were born to women who were slaves, and they remained in this same condition
unless purchased by their fathers and freed.
The male children produced by such unions unsurprisingly played a much dif-
ferent role in the colony than their female counterparts. According to de Marees, the
male black or mulatto slaves (Swerten of Melaten Slaven) made up the main fighting
force at Elmina, and he calls them ‘more villainous and malicious by nature than the
Portuguese’, a telling condemnation indeed!108 This opposition between mulatto
women, attractive and desirable wives and concubines for the European colonizers,
and the mulatto men, not entirely trusted and functioning on the periphery as addi-
tional manpower in the colonial armies, is reproduced in contemporary discussions
about the status of people of mixed racial background in Dutch Brazil and, more
importantly, forms the primary framework for understanding Eckhout’s paintings of
the mulatto man and mameluca.
Eckhout’s Mulatto Man

Consistent with the other paintings of men in Eckhout’s series, the man in this full-
fig. 52 – How the women comport themselves and how they dress, engraving.
length ethnographic portrait carries weapons and stands in a three-quarter pose facing
Reproduced in Pieter de Marees, Beschrijvinge ... vant Gout Koninckrijk van Gunea (1602). the viewer (plate 8). Previous discussions have emphasized his firearm, now identi-
Courtesy of the Royal Library, The Hague. fied as a Portuguese gun, paying little attention to the main figure.109 Eckhout has
placed the man against a cloudy greyish sky in a coastal setting, with three European
not a European woman, although it seems highly improbable that Melato women ships visible on the horizon. The man stands on the bare, sandy ground, framed by a
appeared in public in this manner. In chapter 49, which discusses Elmina, then the field of tall sugar cane on the right and a large papaya tree on the left. His light brown
central trading post on the coast of Guinea, de Marees again takes up the subject of skin, which has a strong yellowish cast, is lighter than that of the Indians in Eckhout’s
the women taken as partners by the Portuguese. Instead of white Portuguese women, other paintings. An uncontrollable halo of frizzy, dark-brown hair grows out of his
whose numbers were very limited, head, and his light-brown eyes stare out at the viewer in a direct, rather confident
manner. He wears a simple long-sleeved shirt and skirt of white cotton cloth, which
they [the Portuguese] take as their Wives many sturdy black women or is made more formal by the addition of a brown and black slashed doublet. Unusual
Mulatto [women], half-white and half-black (that is, yellowish), whom in Eckhout’s series is the fact that this work is unfinished. It is neither signed nor
the Portuguese like very much. Because they are not allowed to marry dated, and the legs appear to have been stopped at the underpainting stage.
them properly, they buy these Women, but they consider them to be as It is nonetheless clear that this figure represents a soldier, which is demon-
much as their own Wives; yet they may separate from them as they strated by comparing the painting to the illustrations in Jacques de Gheyn’s highly
please and in turn buy other women whenever it suits them. They main- popular Wapenhandlinghe van Roers Musquetten ende Spissen (Amsterdam, 1608), a guide-
tain these Wives in grand style and keep them in splendid clothes, and book for weapons that includes a number of instructional plates. The images in de
they always dress more ostentatiously and stand out more than any other Gheyn make it clear that the man in Eckhout’s painting carries his gun over his left
Indigenous women.107 shoulder in the proper, although rather stiff, stance of a soldier who is marching, at
rest, or on guard duty. In this illustration, which demonstrates the correct use of a

musket, the soldier is represented from the opposite side, but similarities to Eckhout’s
figure include the left hand holding the musket, the right hand at the waist, and the
long sword with the decorative handle (which can be seen more clearly in other
plates) (fig. 53).110 Comparison to contemporary Dutch genre paintings that include
soldiers, such as works by the Utrecht artist Jacob Duck, also supports a military con-
nection. Duck’s guardroom scene, Soldiers Arming Themselves (ca. 1630), shows a mus-
keteer lifting a belt of charges over his head, who wears a rapier quite similar to that
worn by Eckhout’s soldier. The facial hair of Eckhout’s figure, who wears a mous-
tache and a small beard, is also typical of soldiers in Dutch genre scenes.
Demonstrating the flexibility of ‘racial’ terms in the seventeenth century, Cas-
par Schmalkalden, another German in the service of the WIC in Brazil, labels the
children of a white father and a black mother (‘von einem weissen Vater und schwarzer
Mutter’) not mulattos, but ‘Mestizen’ (mestizos).111 While this title has occasionally
been applied to Eckhout’s man of mixed racial background in more recent times, mes-
tizos are more typically defined as those with mixed Indian and European heritage.
The figures (excluding the Africans) in Eckhout’s paintings were described in the seven-
teenth century as including ‘Brazilians, Tapuyas, mulattos, and mamalucos’, not mes-
tizos.112 Furthermore, Wagener specifically labels the man in his copy of this painting
a ‘Mulato’, suggesting that this is the proper title for this figure (fig. 54).
Given the paucity of information on the lives of mestizo and mulatto soldiers
in the army of the WIC in Brazil, Wagener’s discussion of the character of mulatto
men and their position in the Dutch colony – written to accompany this copy – is an
invaluable resource. He writes:
The people produced by relations between black women and Portuguese

are called ‘Mulaten’ and like the other slaves, they are condemned to
spend their lives in the worst bondage. Yet there are some who are more
fortunate, who are allowed freedom thanks to the love of their lascivious
fathers...[who] buy him for a goodly sum...and then the child moves
from slavery to freedom. Once fully grown, they are greatly used for all
sorts of military action and know how to handle all types of guns, espe-
cially shotguns, [with which] they daily hunt birds and forest animals,
even daring, in the same way and using the pretext of shooting birds, to
hide in the woods and attack passers-by, as is well know and clear among
both the Portuguese and our people. Therefore, they are considered as
knaves, fickle, false and treacherous. Since they come from Christian
blood, His Excellency [Johan Maurits] originally intended to give them
their freedom once and for all, but he immediately had second thoughts
when told of their dreadful and treacherous behaviour.113
fig. 53 – Jacques de Gheyn, Soldier, engraving. Reproduced in Wapenhandlinghe van
Roers Musquetten ende Spissen (Amsterdam, 1608). Courtesy of the Royal Library, The Hague.

painting to that of the African woman by reproducing a similar setting, complete with
papaya trees and tiny European ships on the horizon. The ships in both paintings may
represent the means by which large numbers of Africans were forcibly brought to
Recife. Furthermore, the reason for this mass importation is present in this painting
in the form of sugar cane, which connects the mulatto man to the sugar plantations
and mills, the primary location of African labour in the colony. The connection
between slaves and sugar cane became quite common in images of the Caribbean
during the eighteenth century, as demonstrated in J.D. Herlin’s 1718 description of
Surinam.114
Despite his juxtaposition with sugar cane, the clothing and weapons carried and
worn by this figure clearly demonstrate that he has been assigned to protect the field,
not labour in it. Although Wagener suggests that all mulattos remained in slavery
unless they were purchased by their fathers and freed, the status of this figure remains
ambiguous. An enslaved status would not have prevented him from serving in the
WIC’s army: slaves were used for fighting by the Dutch as well as the Portuguese in
Africa and the Americas. The mulatto man’s doublet may have been standard issue for
soldiers in the army of the WIC, although the jaguar skin strap for his rapier is a per-
sonal, somewhat exotic, touch, possibly functioning as tangible proof of his skill in
hunting. His weapons are nonetheless standard for musketeers, which is evident from
examining de Gheyn’s book and Duck’s painting. As mentioned above, even the
mulatto’s facial hair, a moustache and a small beard, are part of the standard iconog-
raphy for images of European soldiers. The man in Eckhout’s painting is, however,
not a typical Dutch solider: his tropical location, bare feet, pale yellowish skin, and
fig. 54 – Zacharias Wagener, Mulatto Man, ca. 1641, watercolour on paper, in his Thierbuch. halo of frizzy, dark brown hair all suggest an exotic locale and ethnicity. If it is possi-
ble to assume that this figure is not a slave, it is evident that his freed state and mixed
status have afforded him neither wealth nor prestige. He wears no shoes, and his
Wagener does not introduce any substantial changes in the composition of his copy clothing seems to be made of the same white cloth as the shorts and skirt of the
of this painting, although his mulatto soldier looks even more European than Brasilianen in the ethnographic portrait series. Nonetheless, wearing facial hair also
Eckhout’s. This is because in Wagener’s version his eyes are rounder, his hair is in demonstrated one’s distance from Indians (and perhaps also Africans) as well as one’s
looser curls, his skin is lighter, and his moustache larger. Although Wagener charac- proximity to Europeans. As such it is not insignificant that the man in this painting
terizes mulatto men as ‘fickle, false and treacherous’, certainly nothing in the image has a fuller moustache than the Brasilian man. The fact that his father was a European
suggests that this man has a bad or untrustworthy nature. Nonetheless, soldiers dur- has, nonetheless, not freed him from the enslaved state associated with African her-
ing the seventeenth century in the Dutch Republic comprised a rather suspect group; itage in the New World. Although the mameluca woman, addressed below, did not
they are often pictured drinking, brawling, playing cards, and entertaining prostitutes carry the stigma of African heritage, her position in Dutch society was equally unstable.
in Dutch genre paintings and prints.
But rather than sitting in a tavern or a guardroom of a Dutch genre painting,
Eckhout’s mulatto soldier stands guard in an outdoor, tropical environment.
Examination of his clothing and attributes, as well as his Brazilian setting, provides
clues to the viewer about the status of this figure. Eckhout consciously connects this

Eckhout’s Mameluca: a ‘dusky Brazilian Flora’ 115
Contemporary authors in Brazil still invoke the saying, ‘white woman to marry,
mulatto woman for sex, and the black woman to work’, expressing an attitude whose
roots can be located in the colonial period, and whose framework of power and desire
would certainly have been recognizable to the Dutch in Brazil in the seventeenth cen-
tury.116 Unlike mulatto, mameluco is a term whose use is limited to Brazil, but like
mulatto, mameluco can be traced back to Portuguese sources in the sixteenth centu-
ry, following their establishment of a colonial outpost in Brazil, and may in fact orig-
inate from a Tupí term.117 According to Forbes, as early as 1552 it was used to label
someone as having ‘mixed blood’.118 The basic definition is found in Wagener’s
Thierbuch and the Historia and differs little from that offered by Soler at the beginning
of this section: a mameluco is the offspring of a Tupinamba (Brasilian) woman and a
European man. According to Wagener, the father could be Portuguese or Dutch, but
by 1681 Arnoldus Montanus’s definition mentions only a Portuguese father, possibly
reflecting the fact that the Dutch had officially surrendered their Brazilian colony in
1654.119
Although mamelucos are mentioned in colonial documents beginning in the
first half of the sixteenth century, the first representation of a mameluco is in de Bry’s
version of Hans Staden’s description of Brazil, which has already been discussed in
chapter 4. Although not included among the simple woodcuts in Staden’s original fig. 55 – Zacharias Wagener, Mameluca, ca. 1641, watercolour on paper, in his Thierbuch.
book, de Bry’s embellished edition includes an image of four Christian, half-Tupi-
namba/half-Portuguese brothers taken prisoner by the same Indians who held Staden
during his nine-month captivity. Nude and bound by ropes, they are differentiated rumpled, white dress seems a curious companion to all of this finery, although its
from the Tupinamba by their hairstyles and by the luxuriant moustaches of the two plainness is relieved on the shoulders by epaulettes of embroidery.
central prisoners. They are meant to look European like Hans Staden, who stands As with the painting of Eckhout’s mulatto soldier, scholars have little contem-
nude in the upper left corner of the image and is unmistakable because of his facial porary information available to them apart from Wagener’s caption for his copy of
hair, especially his long beard. In my research, I did not discover any painted repre- Eckhout’s painting in his Thierbuch. Here Wagener states:
sentations of mamelucos that predate Eckhout’s image.
Eckhout’s painting displays a standing half-Brasilian/half-European woman Illicit relations between Brazilian women as much with Portuguese as
holding what one scholar has called a ‘completely useless basket of flowers’ (plate with Dutch leads to the birth to many of these sons [children] of prosti-
9).120 She engages the viewer’s eye with a direct glance and a playful expression – her tutes, among whom it is not uncommon to find attractive and delicate
lips are slightly turned up at the ends suggesting that she will soon break into a fuller, men and women. Normally, they wear long and beautiful white cotton
more inviting smile. A green landscape dotted with sugar plantations stretches out shirts during the week, but on Sundays and holidays, they dress them-
behind her, and a large cashew tree dangles ripe fruit over her head. At the base of the selves up gaudily in the Spanish style, adorning their neck, ears and
tree, two guinea pigs huddle together. Behind her and next to the tree, a large flower hands with coral and a profusion of false stones. Given their elegant fig-
resembling a bird of paradise is in full bloom.121 She is fully jewelled, with an ornate ure, some pass for Spanish ladies. The men tend to work in any legal pro-
necklace and matching earrings.122 These jewels are complemented by her small green fession or to use their great skill at military matters. Many of the women
hat decorated with pearls and a sprig of orange tree blossoms.123 Her simple, slightly marry within their own caste; others however (almost the majority) are

fig. 56 – Crispijn de Passe, Brabantina and Stellifera, engraving. Reproduced in Les Vrais Pourtraits (1640).
Courtesy of the Royal Library, The Hague. fig. 57 – Crispijn de Passe, Flora, engraving. Reproduced in Hortus Floridus (1616).
Courtesy of the Royal Library, The Hague.
very honestly and legitimately desired as legal wives, sometimes by fairly

wealthy Portuguese and also by some Dutch who are anxious to wed.124 vain and sexually promiscuous. Wagener describes the mothers of such woman as
‘prostitutes’, and it is possible that the mameluca may have suffered the same status
In his watercolour copy that accompanies this description, Wagener’s mameluca is by association. As if to signal her approachability and possibly suggest that she is ‘ripe
not delicate (fig. 55). Her smile has faded and her features have been coarsened, pos- for the taking’, her appearance may owe something to the iconography of affability or
sibly in an attempt to make her appear less European and more ‘Indian’ than the Vriendlijkheit. In Ripa’s Iconologia he describes this personification as a young woman
woman in Eckhout’s original painting. In Wagener’s version her full breasts and a with a cheerful expression, clad in a thin white wrap and holding a rose in her right
broad nose make her resemble Eckhout’s Brasilian woman. Wagener’s description of hand and wearing a crown of flowers on her head.125
the status of mestizo women in the colony echoes comments made by de Marees The mameluca also calls upon contemporary conventions in portraiture as pre-
about the mulatto women in Elmina. As noted above, in seventeenth-century Euro- sented in books like Crispijn de Passe’s Les Vrais Pourtraits (1640). This book includes
pean colonies in Africa and South America, women of mixed racial background were twenty-eight portraits of noble and generally upper-class women and girls represent-
highly desirable as sexual partners for European men, although they were not always ed as shepherdesses.126 While these women are dressed in a more elegant fashion,
considered prime material for marriage. We find evidence of this point of view pre- Eckhout’s mameluca could be the mestizo sister of De Passe’s Stellifera (fig. 56), who
sent in the visual traditions that shaped Eckhout’s painting. appears in the section devoted to young noble women. Stellifera and the mameluca
As with the other figures in this series of ethnographic portraits, Eckhout’s have the same hairstyle with wavy hair worn short and loose, both wear small hats
mameluca is carefully composed. In keeping with the stereotypical view of mestizo decorated with pearls, and each has a dress with a plunging neckline. Furthermore,
women, Eckhout wanted his mameluca to be seen as attractive and desirable, as well as the viewer gets the impression that the main figures in each one of these images are

dressing up and playing a ‘rustic’ role for the viewer. Books of portraits like this one
were also produced for famous prostitutes and include de Passe’s Miroir des plus belles
courtisanes de ce temps (1631).
Connections to portraiture and prostitution do not, however, explain the pres-
ence of the guinea pigs or the allegedly ‘useless’ basket of flowers she holds aloft in
her right hand. In calling the mameluca a ‘dusky Brazilian Flora’, Whitehead and
Boeseman were the first to recognize the connection to Flora, whose main attributes
are flowers. Indeed, the appearance of the mameluca, with a few Brazilian modifica-
tions, fits in remarkably well with the iconography of Flora in European art. Eckhout
was clearly aware of the symbolic connotations of this visual tradition, which resonate
with the historical position of mestizo women in Dutch Brazil as objects of sexual
desire. Flora, the Roman goddess of ‘flowers, gardens, spring, and love’, was a popular
subject in Renaissance and Baroque art, with painted versions by well-known Nor-
fig. 58 – Georg Marcgraf, Cavia, Handbook I, Courtesy of the Jagiellon University Library, Kraków.
thern European artists such as Jan Massys, Peter Paul Rubens, and Rembrandt van
Rijn.127 An engraved example by Cornelius Cort after Frans Floris depicts a seated
Flora in a long, loose-fitting drapery next to a basket of flowers.128 An image of Flora mameluca Flora, Eckhout found the perfect manner in which to capture the essence
that is a bit closer to Eckhout’s mameluca can be found in Crispijn de Passe’s Hortus of this attractive and desirable mestizo woman, a prospective sexual partner for Euro-
Floridus (1616), where the goddess sits under a fruit-laden tree, wears a wreath of pean colonists and soldiers in Brazil.
flowers, and holds a cornucopia bursting with flowers (fig. 57). Titian’s Flora (ca. In Eckhout’s painting of the mameluca, the cashew fruits, ripe in the Brazilian
1515), however, is without a doubt one of the most famous versions of this subject. spring, refer to the fertility of the colony and perhaps even to the highly intoxicating
In this version, Flora is dressed in a loose-fitting white gown that slips off her shoul- cashew fruit wine made every year by the Tupinamba, the ethnic group of the
der and threatens to expose her entire left nipple. With her left hand she casually cov- mameluca’s mother. Natural historians Whitehead and Boeseman have called the
ers herself with a fine brocade cape; her right hand is held slightly aloft and spills over guinea pigs at her feet ‘harmless and frivolous’, but the connection between rabbits
with flower blossoms. and guinea pigs may represent yet another connection to Flora’s fertility. For Euro-
Julius Held’s classic study asserts that because of the goddess’s somewhat shady pean colonists, Brazilian birds were ‘pheasants’, wild boars were ‘pigs’, and guinea pigs
history, which includes her identification with a rich Roman prostitute as well as her were ‘rabbits’. In his discussion of the ‘different varieties of Brazilian rabbits’, Marc-
long-term association with Venus, Flora was a favorite guise in which to depict Italian graf lists guinea pigs (‘cavia cabaya’) along with aperea, paca, and agouti.132 Under
courtesans during the Renaissance.129 Accordingly, he calls Titian’s figure ‘Flora the Marcgraf’s drawing of a guinea pig in Handbook I, Johan Maurits writes, ‘This is a rab-
courtesan’.130 This painting, in the possession of a Portuguese merchant in bit, the size of the European ones’ (fig. 58).133 Eckhout may have used this image as
Amsterdam around 1640, was widely known at the time through copies and an the source for his white, brown, and black guinea pig in the foreground of his paint-
engraved version by Joachim von Sandrart.131 The fact that the mameluca’s white ing of the mameluca. Given contemporary European beliefs regarding rabbits and fer-
dress strongly resembles the gown worn by Titian’s Flora is probably a simple coinci- tility, it is only appropriate that Eckhout chose a Brazilian ‘rabbit’ to accompany his
dence, but the looseness of mameluca’s gown and its plunging, highly suggestive Brazilian ‘Flora’. As goddess of spring, Flora was associated with rebirth, and what
neckline nonetheless heighten the image’s sexual subtext. The mameluca’s gesture in better way to signal this than by including rabbits, long a symbol of sexual reproduc-
exposing her ankle by lifting her skirt is flirtatious and invites erotic speculation. tion. See, for example, Roemer Visscher’s Sinnepoppen (1614), in which rabbits illus-
Contemporary viewers undoubtedly recognized that the woman depicted was either trate the saying ‘Ex foecunditate ubertas’ (uit vruchtbaarheid overvloed/from fertili-
a prostitute or a concubine. Whether or not Eckhout knew Titian’s original painting ty overabundance). In Ripa, one of Fecundity’s main attributes is a mother rabbit and
or Von Sandrart’s engraving after it, he was surely familiar enough with images of her newly born babies.134 Among the large number of paintings inspired by Titian’s
Flora to have known that she was the goddess of the spring and fertility. In creating a image is a painting of Flora with two rabbits by an anonymous Venetian artist.135

While Eckhout certainly could not have known this image, this demonstrates that ber of interpretative problems arise when one more closely investigates Eckhout’s
rabbits (or the Brazilian version thereof) could be included among Flora’s attributes. paintings of the Africans, the mulatto, and the mameluca, as we have done here.139
Eckhout’s series of ethnographic portraits should not be read as a human ver- One of the first objections that can be made is the simple fact that there are four pairs
sion of Noah’s ark with a male and female breeding pair for each ‘species’. As demon- of figures but only three levels of civility. This problem has been solved in a somewhat
strated above, the Africans represent different parts of West Africa: Guinea and awkward manner by placing the Brasilianen and the Africans on ‘more or less the same
Angola. Similarly, Eckhout chose to represent two sorts of people of mixed ethnicity: level’.140 Van den Boogaart’s discussion of civility originated as an opposition between
the mulatto man as a soldier and the mameluca as the beautiful concubine. Although the semi-civilized Brasilianen and the irredeemably savage Tapuya, which he then
Van den Boogaart has puzzled over the fact that the man and woman of mixed racial expanded to the rest of the paintings in this series, resulting in a somewhat awkward
background appear without a child, this was undoubtedly a conscious omission. In the fit. As has become clear in the analysis above, in terms of their visual presentation and
nineteenth century scientists argued that mulattos and mestizos were degenerate and degree of culture attained, it is not the Brasilianen, but the mameluca and the mulatto
had lower rates of fertility; it is possible that similar ideas were already present in the whose images are most closely related to the Africans. Both the African woman and
seventeenth century. However, given the clear references to fertility in the painting of the mameluca, for example, wear costly jewellery, and both the African man and the
the woman, the primary reason for the lack of offspring may be because the mulatto mulatto soldier carry finely crafted weapons.
and the mameluca were not intended to form a couple in the reproductive sense.136 As The Africans, indeed, require their own level of civility, above the Brasilianen
depicted, the mameluca is sexualized and open to contact with European men. Depict- and directly below the man and woman of mixed race. As addressed in chapter 3, such
ing her with a child would have diminished her accessibility and desirability. The a hierarchy of four had already been established in Abraham Ortelius’s frontispiece to
mulatto man belongs to a lower caste than the mameluca, and he is superior to Africans his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (fig. 26).141 In Ortelius’s frontispiece, the personifica-
slaves only because of his European blood and position within the Dutch army. tion of Africa was placed above America because she had attained a higher degree of
civility.142 With Eckhout’s Africans, their placement above the Indians and next to the
mulatto and mameluca is due, in part, to their beautiful and costly attributes, which
Levels of Civility: Three Become Four demonstrate a sophisticated material culture. But the high position of the Africans is
also because of their importance in Dutch Brazil. Africans, both as slaves and as allies,
As addressed in greater detail in chapter 4, Ernst van den Boogaart was the first to argue played an increasingly central role in the economic and political life of the colony.
that the paintings in Eckhout’s ethnographic portrait series create a three-tiered hier- The success of Dutch Brazil could be measured in the work of her slaves in the sugar
archy of civility. The eight paintings include four male/female pairs: Tapuyas, Brasilia- mills and in the fields; the continued supply of these forced migrants from Africa
nen, Africans, a mulatto man and a mameluca. According to this interpretive framework, required the Dutch to undertake conquest and develop trade relationships with vari-
the cannibalistic and naked Tapuya are the least civilized of the group. The Africans are ous kingdoms along the West African coast. Eckhout’s painting of the African woman,
placed in the middle position with the Brasilianen, because both pairs are considered in particular, holds a special place of honour in this series – her body is refined, fecund,
‘recruits’ to civility. The mulatto man and mameluca woman occupy the highest level, and highly desirable, but at the same time muscled, sturdy, and capable of hard work.
because they are closest to the implicit European paradigm in attributes as well as phys- Eckhout’s paintings operate within a complicated hierarchy of civility and con-
ical characteristics.137 Scholars have argued that they have a more attractive and refined tain multiple messages and sometimes contradictory information, all of which reveal
appearance than the Indians or Africans. The mulatto and mameluca are said to be the biases, needs, and finally the implicit desires of both their colonial and their Euro-
‘decently dressed’, look more ‘European’.138 They carry and wear objects that signify pean audiences in the seventeenth century. At the most basic level, they are detailed
their superior degree of civility over the Indians and Africans. Their position above the representations of the people present in Johan Maurits’s Brazilian domain, and as such
rest of the figures is primarily based on the fact that their fathers are Europeans, are products of the colonial environment. This does not, of course, preclude the pos-
although none of these scholars suggests that Eckhout’s series endorses miscegenation. sibility that they could have functioned as trophies in the Count’s Kunst und Wunder-
This interpretive framework has been widely adopted as the most convincing kammer, either in the Dutch Republic or Brazil. The following chapter will continue
explanation for Eckhout’s series of ethnographic portraits. Despite the fact that civility to address these questions of meaning, audience, and display through an examination
does appear to be one of the main organizing principles behind these images, a num- of the still lifes and the ethnographic portraits as a complete pictorial cycle.

Chapter 4 6 Whitehead and Boeseman, p. 203. 17 Baumunk, p. 194. The Tapuya woman, was Politics of Cannibalism’, Hispanic American
7 Ibid. connected (by witch-fearing men) to the Historical Review 80.4 (2000): pp. 721-751.
1 P.J.P. Whitehead and M. Boeseman, p. 203. 8 Ibid, p. 178. ‘toothed vagina’ of the wild woman. 31 See Pratt’s discussion of ‘survival literature’,
Paul Vandenbroek, Beeld van de andere, vertoog 9 Despite the recent interest in Eckhout and 18 Vandenbroek, p. 38. pp. 86-87.
over het zelf (Antwerp: Koninklijk Museum the public exhibition of his work, there has 19 See ‘Portrayal and Betrayal: The Colonial 32 Janet Whatley notes this about Thevet’s
voor Schone Kunst, 1987), p. 38. been little attempt to fit him into a more Gaze in Seventeenth Century Brazil’, Culture images, but this can be applied to the entire
2 Six of these drawings may be found in the Libri inclusive view of Dutch visual production in and History 6 (1989): pp.37-62. See also group. See her introduction to Jean de Léry,
picturati collection of natural history illustra- the seventeenth century. Mason and Florike Egmond, The Mammoth History of a voyage to the land of Brazil, otherwise
tions in Kraków. Two images are in volume 10 See E. Börsch-Supan, Garten-, Landschafts- and the Mouse. Microhistory and Morphology called America, trans., Janet Whatley (Berkeley:
three (A34) of the Theatrum rerum naturalium und Paradiesmotive im Innenraum (Berlin, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Univerisity of California Press, 1990).
Brasiliae and four are included in the Miscella- 1967), p. 287, as quoted by Bodo-Michael Press, 1997) and Infelicities, both of which 33 Hans Staden, The True History of His Captivity,
nea Cleyeri (A38). Five other drawings, which Baumunk, ‘Von Brasilischen fremden Völkern. draw upon this earlier article. 1557 (London: George Routledge & Sons,
are consistent with those in Poland in terms Die Eingeborenen-Darstellungen Albert 20 Mason, ‘Portrayal and Betrayal’, p. 53. 1928), p. 136. All subsequent references will
of support, materials, and style, are in the Eckhouts’, in Mythen der neuen Welt. Zur 21 Ibid., p. 59. be to this translation.
collection of the Kupferstichkabinett, Staats- Entdeckungsgeschichte Lateinamerikas, ed. 22 Ibid., pp. 56-59. 34 Staden, p. 145.
bibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. K.H. Kohl (Berlin: Fröhlich & Kaufmann, 23 Ibid., pp. 58-59. 35 This has been most closely analysed in the
3 Johan Maurits to Resident Le Maire in 1982), p. 190. 24 ‘Ondanks het ogenschijnlijke hyperrealism work of Frank Lestringant.
Copenhagen, 26 July 1679, A4, 1477, KHA, 11 William C. Sturtevant, ‘First Visual Images is de ethnografische weergave incorrect: 36 André Thevet, The new found worlde or
The Hague. Resident Le Maire to Johan of Native America’, First Images of America: de Tarairiu-vrowu wordt met ‘sensationele’ Antarctike (London, 1568), p. 36r [note that
Maurits in Kassel, 2 Sept. 1679, A4, 1477, The Impact of the New World on the Old details...als kannibale gekenschetst, hoewel there was a printing error: this should have
KHA, The Hague. Le Maire responded to (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1976), p. 419. het Tarairiu-volk niet kanibalistisch was’ been 42r]. The original French reads: ‘Elle
Johan Maurits’s request for the return of the 12 Rudger Joppien, ‘The Dutch Vision of (Vandenbroek, p. 38). Ignoring the evidence ‘a esté & est habitée pour le iourd’huy, outré
ethnographic portrait series or for the creation Brazil’, Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, presented in Eckhout’s chalk drawings, les Chrestiens, qui depuis Americ Vespuce
of half-size copies, if return of the images 1604-1679: A Humanist Prince in Dutch Brazil Mason states: ‘the allegation that they slept on l’habitent, de gens merveilleusement estranges,
was not possible. Le Maire noted that he had (The Hague: The Johan Maurits van Nassau the ground and not in hammocks is another & sauvages, sans foy, sans loy, sans religion,
spoken with the king about the images of the Stichting, 1979), p. 302. feature which is not borne out by the early sans civilité aucune, mais vivans comme bestes
Brazilians, Tapuyas, Mulatos, and Mamelucos 13 For additional examples of the critical sources’(‘Portrayal and Betrayal’, pp. 51-52.) irraisonnables, ainsi que nature les ‘a produits,
(Ick hebbe met den coninck van denemarcken approach now taken with respect to Neither author cites his source, but it is mangeans racines, demeurans tousiours nuds
[over de] brasilianen, tapoyers, molaten, en Eckhout’s naturalism, see Viktoria Schmidt- likely that this information comes from John tant hommes que femmes, iusques à tant, peut
mamaluken gesprocken...). Linsenhoff, ‘Rhetorik der Hautfarben’, Hemming’s Red Gold, in which he simply estre, qu’íls seront hantez des Chrestiens,
4 John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the in Wahrnehming und Repräsentation in der states that the ‘Tapuia’ were not cannibals dont ils pourront peu à peu despouiller ceste
Brazilian Indians (London: Macmillan, 1978), frühen Kolonialgeschichte Europas (Frankfurt: (p. 297). For another point of view see Robert brutalité, pour vestir une façon plus civile &
p. 99. Vittorio Klostermann, 2003) and the work Lowrie, ‘The Tarairiu’ in The Marginal Tribes, humaine,’ André Thevet, Les Singularitéz de la
5 See Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: a sketch of Denise Daum (who is currently writing vol. 1, Handbook of South American Indians France antarctique (Paris, 1557), p. 51v. Unless
of a physical description of the universe, 4 vols., a dissertation on Eckhout’s paintings and (Washington: US Government Printing otherwise indicated all subsequent references
trans. E. C. Otté (New York: Harper and their representation of skin colour and Office, 1946-1959). will be to the English translation.
Brothers, 1869-70). Other examples include, ‘cultural difference’: ‘Brasilianische Hetero- 25 Pagden, p. 4. 37 Thevet, p.36r.
Paul Ehrenreich, ‘Über einige ältere Bildnisse genität. Albert Eckhouts Visualisierung 26 Alfred Métraux, ‘The Tupinamba’ in The 38 Lestringant, Cannibals, pp. 44-46.
südamerikanischer Indianer’, Globus Illusttierte kultureller Differenz’). Tropical Forest Tribes, vol. 3, Handbook of South 39 Thevet, 59r.
Zeitschrift für Länder- und Völkerkunde Bd. 14 Ernst van den Boogaart, ‘The Dutch West American Indians, p. 95. 40 Cousins later illustrated Thevet’s La
LXVI N. 6, (August 1894): pp. 81-90, and India Company’, pp. 519-538. This was 27 Hemming, p. 24. Cosmographie universelle (Paris, 1575).
Thomas Thomsen, Albert Eckhout, Ein Nieder- expanded upon in his article, ‘The Slow 28 Métraux, p. 95. 41 Susi Colin, Das Bild des Indianers im 16.
ländischer Maler und sein Gönner Moritz der Progress of Colonial Civility: Indians in the 29 This event has been addressed by a number of Jahrhundert (Idstein: Schulz-Kirchner Verlag,
Brasilianer ein Kulturbild aus dem 17. Jahr- Pictorial Record of Dutch Brazil, 1637-1644’ scholars, including Steve Mullaney, ‘Strange 1988), pp. 111-112.
hundert (Copenhagen: Ejnar Munksgaard, in La Imagen del Indio en la Europa Moderna Things: Gross Terms: The Rehearsal of 42 Thevet, p. 47.
1938). See pages 157-161 for Thomsen’s (C.S.I.C., Seville, 1990), p. 395. Cultures in the Late Renaissance’, Representa- 43 Chapter 54 (‘De la riviere des Vases, ensemble
discussion of these images, which he largely 15 Van den Boogaart, ‘The Dutch West India tions 3 (Summer 1985): pp. 40-67, and Frank d’aucuns animaux qui se trouvent là environ,
interprets through the descriptions written Company’, p. 538. Lestringant, Cannibals, pp. 41-42. & de la terre nomée Morpion). See also
by Zacharias Wagener on his contemporary 16 Van den Boogaart, ‘The Slow Progress of 30 For recent scholarship on Staden see Neil chapter 33 (D’un arbre nommé paquovere)
copies of these paintings. Colonial Civility’, p. 395. Whitehead, ‘Hans Staden and the Cultural and chapter 59 (‘Comme la terre de
246 visions of savage paradise notes chapter 4 247

l’Amerique fut decouverte, & le bois Bresil 64 Van den Boogaart, ‘Slow Progress of Colonial Pernambuco, Itamaraca, Paraiba, and Rio were created by European artists who clearly
trouvé...) Civility’, p. 398. Grande (‘Slow Progress of Colonial Civility’, viewed the peoples of the New World
44 Ter Ellington, The Myth of the Noble Savage 65 Barlaeus notes that when the Portuguese left, 1990), p. 8. through the veil of the ‘wild man’ tradition.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, the aldea Indians were left in the lurch (p. 43) 73 Soler, p. 42. 88 X-radiography carried out by the National-
2001). He identifies the Frenchman Marc 66 Olivia Harris, ‘Ethnic Identity and Market 74 Soler, p. 41. museet Conservation Department has
Lescarbot as the inventor of the myth, Relations: Indians and Mestizos in the Andes’, 75 Wagener, p. 162. revealed another bird, which Eckhout later
although it takes a rather different form Ethnicity, Markets, and Migration in the Andes: 76 Van den Boogaart, ‘Slow Progress of Colonial covered up. Both birds correspond to sketches
when revived circa 1850. At the Crossroads of History and Anthropology, Civility’, p. 12. in the Libri picturati, but they are probably
45 Claire Farago calls this work pivotal in the ed. Brooke Larson and Olivia Harris. 77 Seventeenth-century report from the archive the work of Eckhout’s assistant, whom I call
establishment of ‘the noble savage as a utopian (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), of Hilten. See ‘Sommier discours over den the copy artist. See Appendix A in Brienen,
theme in modern thought’. See her essay, p. 359. staet vande vier geconquesteerde capitanias ‘Art and Natural History at a Colonial Court’,
‘Jean de Léry’s Anatomy Lesson: the 67 De Laet, Het Iaerlyck Verhael van Johannes de Parnambuco, Itamarica, Paraiba ende Rio for a discussion of his contributions.
Persuasive Power of Word and Image in Laet, ed. S.P.L’Honoré and J.C.M. Warn- Grande, inde noorderdeelern van Brasil’, 89 Whitehead and Boeseman identify the boat’s
Framing the Ethnographic Subject’, European sinck (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1937), p. Bijdragen en Medeelingen van het historisch occupants as two Europeans and a ‘native
Iconography East and West, p. 109. 435. All subsequent references will be to this genootschap gevestigd te Utrecht 2 (1879): servant’ (p. 69). However, when I examined
46 Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, edition. This work was originally published pp. 256-311. this painting in June 1999, all three figures
p. 57. See also Whatley, p. xvi. in 1644 as Historie ofte jaerlijck verhael van de 78 Soler, p. 41. appeared European.
47 Jean de Léry, History of a voyage to the land of verrichtinghen der Geoctroyeerde West-Indische 79 Wagener, p. 162. 90 As suggested in correspondence with Claudia
Brazil, otherwise called America, trans., Janet Compagnie. 80 ‘Sommier discours’, p. 291. Swan, April 2002.
Whatley (Berkeley: Univerisity of California 68 According to Métraux, the Tupinamba 81 For example, in Jean de Léry’s description 91 Van den Boogaart, ‘Slow Progress of Colonial
Press, 1990), p. 56. All quotes from de Léry Potiguara, ‘banded with the Dutch and waged of the Tupininkin Tupinamba, he discusses Civility’, p. 403.
in English will be from this translation. war against the Portuguese until 1654’ (p. 95). their use of ‘genipap’ dye to blacken their 92 Despite her light skin colour, clear kinship
48 Whatley, p. xxxiii. See also Hemming, pp. 161-182. legs and thighs (Léry, p. 62). to the Brasilian baby in the painting of the
49 Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World, 69 ‘De Brasilianen, de oude inwoonders en 82 Soler, p. 41. ‘Sommier discours’, p. 291. Brasilian women, and the fact that she wears
p. 57. heeren van dese landen, woonen niet onder 83 Whitehead and Boeseman suggest that this is the white cloth covering of the Brasilianen,
50 Léry, p. 163. de Portugesue vermengt, maet appart in haere a fishing net, which seems unlikely, because this image is usually labeled ‘Negro’.
51 Léry, p. 158. aldeas oft dorpen’. See Barlaeus, Nederlandsch men are the only ones ever seen fishing 93 Located on an island off the coast of Mada-
52 Léry, p. 64. Brazilie onder het bewind van Johan Maurits (p. 70). Van den Boogaart calls it a hammock gascar. See Om de Zuid: De Eerste Schipvaart
53 Later editions included additional representa- Grave van Nassau 1637-1644, ed. and trans. (‘Slow Progress of Colonial Civility’, p. 401). naar Oost-Indië onder Cornelis de Houtman,
tions after Thevet. S.P. L’Honore (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, A hammock is an attribute of the personifica- 1595-97, opgetekend door Willem Lodewycksz,
54 Léry, p. 56. 1923), p. 161. Unless otherwise noted, all tion of America in Philip de Galle’s Discovery trans. Vibeke Roeper and Diederick Wilde-
55 Ibid, p. 57. references will be to this Dutch edition. of America. man (Nijmegen: SUN, 1997), pp. 72-75.
56 Chapter 44. 70 Herckmans’s original report is in the records 84 Robert H. Lowrie, ‘The Tropical Forests’ Unless otherwise indicated, all references are
57 Farago, p. 113 of the Dutch West India Company in the in The Tropical Forest Tribes, vol. 3, Handbook to this modern Dutch edition.
58 Ibid, pp. 118-119. ARA in The Hague. See Herckmans, ‘Gene- of South American Indians, p. 4. 94 This group’s peaceful trading relationship
59 Jean de Léry’s illustrations appear to have had rale Beschrijvinge van de Capitanie Paraiba’, 85 Boogaart, ‘Infernal Allies’, p. 538 and ‘Slow with the Dutch, like the relationship between
little direct influence on his contemporaries, Bijdragen en Medelingen van het Historisch Progress of Colonial Civility’, pp. 13-14; the Brasilianen and the Dutch, may have
although echos of Thevet’s elegant Tupinamba Genootschap 2 (1879): pp. 319-367. Unless Baumunk, p. 192; Mason, ‘Portrayal and inspired Eckhout to use her figure as a
can be traced into the seventeenth century, in otherwise noted, all subsequent references Betrayal’, p. 49. model.
books like Hans Weigel’s Habitus Preacipou- will be to this edition of the report. 86 All of the paintings in this series were trimmed, 95 Laura Fishman, ‘Crossing Gender Boundaries:
rium populorum (1639). See the illustration: 71 Herckmans, p. 339. but this image shows evidence of a more Tupi and European Women in the Eyes of
‘Brasiliensium vel Hominum in Peru habitus’. 72 Vincent Joachim Soler, Cort ende Sonderlingh drastic attempt to make it smaller. At some Claude d’Abbeville’, French Colonial History
60 Bucher, p. 49. She also notes that most Verhael (Amsterdam, 1639), translated as point in this painting’s history, someone cut (2003) 4: 81-98. See also Silver, ‘Forest
Amerindians are displayed as young adults. Brief and Curious Report of Some Peculiarities of across the canvas above the main figure’s Primeval’.
61 Hemming, pp. 83-85. This was ordered by Brazil, vol. 1, Documents in the Leiden Univer- head. Apparently there was a change of heart, 96 See Carole Duncan, ‘Happy mothers and
Mem. de Sá, who governed Brazil from 1558- sity Library, Dutch Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, because this damage was carefully repaired at other new ideas in eighteenth-century French
1572. Editora Index, 1997.), p. 41. All subsequent a very early date according to Barbara Berlo- art’ in The aesthetics of power: essays in critical
62 Quoted in Hemming, p. 107. references are to this translation. Ernst van wicz of the National Museet in Copenhagen. art history (Cambridge: Cambridge University
63 Hemming, p. 297. He had been the director den Boogaart states that less than 10,000 87 The earliest images of Amerindians, showing Press, 1993).
of these aldeas under the Portuguese. Amerindians lived in the ‘provinces’ of men with beards and other types of facial hair 97 See Harris, pp. 351-390.

98 Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in 111 See Ernst van den Boogaart, ‘Infernal Allies’, 119 ‘Het sijn onwetende ende ongeleerde men- 133 The very earliest reports on Brazilian
the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon p. 528. Rabe was married to an indigenous schen, geen kennisee hebbende vanden Tupinamba Indians mention their tendency
Press, 1993), p. 123. woman, although her ethnicity remains waren Godt ofte sijne geoden, mear integen- to stain their legs with juice of the Jennip
99 Wagener (1997), p. 162. Wagener’s image unclear. Most sources claim that she was a deel dienen den Duyvel often eenigerhande tree. See Jean de Léry et al.
exaggerates his moustache. Tapuya Indian. However, Ernst van den boose geesten.’ (p. 360). ‘Voor leyden sij 134 According to conservator Barbara Berlowicz,
100 Ehrenreich, p. 87. D. Maybury-Lewis, ‘Some Boogaart states that she was Tupinamba. een gansch beestachtich en sorgeloos leven’ they had been covered up by previous
Crucial Distinctions in Central Brazilian 112 Herckmans, p. 359. (p. 362). restorers, probably because the splotches are
Ethnology’ in Anthropos 60: pp. 340-358, as 113 ‘Voor leyden sij een gansch beestachtich 120 Herckmans, pp. 365-366. not particularly attractive and suggest the
cited in Mason, ‘Portrayal and Betrayal’, p. 43. en soregeloos leven’ (p. 362). Herckmans 121 He also discusses the ‘ostrich’ feathers worn appearance of dirt more than any kind of
101 Hemming, 297. begins his ethnography with the sentence by the men in a circular arrangement over discernable pattern.
102 Martius, p. 1, as quoted in Lowrie, ‘Tapuya’, ‘The above mentioned people are strong their buttocks and their diet, which includes 135 Technical examination of these spots was
p. 553. of body’ (Dit geseyde volck is kloeck van snake meat. As discussed by Barlaeus, pp. carried out by the conservation staff at the
103 Hemming, p. 297. lichaem) making it unclear whether he 329-330. National Museet, Copenhagen.
104 Lowrie states ‘There is no “Tapuya” culture: means the Tarairiu or the Tapuya as a group. 122 Volume 1454, p. 198, A4, KHA, The Hague. 136 While better known for his book on Asia,
except in quoting old writers on otherwise However, because he says at the beginning For a detailed analysis of this text, see this posthumously published work, largely
undefined groups so designated, the term that this is a description of the Tapuya and Ernst van den Boogaart and Rebecca Parker based on Barlaeus and others, includes some
should be eliminated from scientific usage’ uses this word later in the text, I have Brienen, Information from Ceará from Georg original information that the author gath-
(‘Tapuya’, p. 556). assumed that his report describes character- Marcgraf (June-August 1639). Vol. 1 of Brasil ered during his years in Brazil. Niehoff’s
105 It is of course very difficult to determine istics of the Tapuya nation in general. Holandês/Dutch-Brazil, eds. Cristina Ferrao artist takes a few liberties and also applies
what was their ‘true’ name and what was 114 ‘Dit geseyde volck is kloeck van lichaem, and Jose Paulo Monteiro Soares. Rio de spots to the skin of the Tapuya man,
imposed on them by outsiders. For example, groot van stature, groff ende sterck van Janiero: Editora Index, 2002. although there is no evidence that he was
Johannes de Laet, Historie ofte iaerlyck Verhael gebeenten, dick ende groot van hooft; sijn 123 Whitehead and Boeseman, p. 67. similarly spotted in the original painting.
(1644, part 4) states that the Tapuya under van cleur uyt de natuer bruynachtich, swart 124 As noted in Whitehead and Boeseman. I thank Barbara Berlowicz for bringing my
Jandovi are called ‘Tararyuck’ by other Amer- van haer opt hooft.’(p. 359) Haere manne- 125 Correspondence with Barbara Berlowicz, attention to this source.
indians and their Tapuya neighbors, p. 49. lickheyt halen sij ‘t vel over, ende binded het conservator, National Museum of Denmark, 137 Baumunk, p. 194. Mason follows this argu-
106 De Laet’s Historie ofte iaerlyck Verhael (1644) met een bandeken toe...dit snoerken is het Copenhagen. See also Berlowicz ment in his 1989 article, ‘Portrayal and
is an important primary resource, as are vijgenbladt, waer mede hare beschaemte (Copenhagen, 2002). Betrayal’.
the documents in the ARA in The Hague. bedect is’ (p. 359). ‘Sij dragen gansch geen 126 R. Klessmann, ‘Unbekannte Zeichnungen 138 Léry, p. 140.
See Ernst van den Boogaart, ‘Infernal Allies’, baerden noch haer op eenige gedeelte des von Albert Eckhout’, Oud Holland 80 (1965): 139 See ‘Der Teuffel Aygnan schlegy die
pp. 519-538. lichaems’ (p. 360). pp. 50-52. Wilden’, in de Bry, Dritte Buch, Americae,
107 This is based on Purchas, who in turn uses 115 Herckmans, p. 359. (...swart van haer opt 127 Thevet (1971), 101r. The Amazons are Darinn Brasilia durch Johann Staden...1593),
Cardim as his source. hooft, inde neck gemeenlijck neerhangende, represented as fully naked with bows and p. 215. Wagener, p. 168.
108 De Laet, Historie ofte iaerlyck Verhael, p. 435 maet voor tot over de orren gelijck affgecort, arrows in Thevet’s illustration for chapter 63. 140 Herckmans, p. 360. In English accounts
(the 13th book). al offse een bonet opt hooft hadden... (p. 359) 128 Baumunk, p. 194. witchcraft is mentioned in association with
109 Brandão, Dialogues of the Great Things of ...boven de kin inde benedenste lip, daeer 129 See Dog-headed Cannibals, which illustrated Amerindians.
Brazil, trans F.A.H. Hall et al. (Albuquerque: sij dan een groen, wit, swart ofte coleurt Underweisung und uszlegung De Cartha Marina 141 See, for example, the discussion by Jose de
University of Mexico, 1986), pp. 325-326, steentegen in setten... (p. 365). (1530). It is reproduced as illustration 138 in Acosta, Historie Naturael ende morael vand
as quoted by Mason (1989), p. 44. 116 ‘Men steeckt haer in yder wang een gat, daer Hugh Honour’s ‘Science and Exoticism’. de westersche Indien, Dutch translation by
110 Herckmans’s description of the Tapuyas was sij stockens off witte beentgens in dragen, in 130 Lestringant, Cannibals, p. 19. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, 1598. Beyond
reproduced by Barlaeus in 1647, and in 1648 fatsoes al waren ‘t stucken van affgebroocken 131 Padgen, pp. 81-82. Pagden notes that dogs their nudity, Baumunk points to the inclusion
de Laet had also used it and Raab’s report tobacxpijpen’ (p. 363). are ‘symbols of unselective eating habits’, of armadillos in this painting, which were
for his descriptions of Amerindians in Brazil, 117 ‘Sij gaen geheel moeder naect...hare manne- citing Arab merchants of the Sudan who used by indigenous witch doctors in Brazil,
included in the Historia. The original report lickheyt halen sij ’t vel over, ende binden het described the Azande (African cannibals) as according to Willem Piso. Baumunk notes
by Herckman is in the archives of the WIC met een bandeken toe...dit snoerken is het having dog-faces, dog-teeth, and dog tails. that the armadillo pictured in the fore-
in the ARA in The Hague. For the sake of vijgenbladt, waer mede hare beschaemte See also Morse, pp. 132-133. ground of this painting is mentioned by
convenience, I have used a published tran- dedect is’ (p. 359). ‘De vrouwen...gaen oock 132 As of 1630, this map was reproduced in his Piso as an animal used by Brazilian ‘witches’
scription of this document from 1879. See gansch naeckt, uytgesondert voor haer world atlas. See Blaeu, de grote atlas van de in their spells, p. 194. See also Mason,
Herckmans, pp. 318-367. Unless otherwise schamelheyt ende acter behangen met wereld in de 17e eeuw, trans. S. Brinkman ‘Portrayal and Betrayal,’ p. 50. Nonetheless,
indicated, all references will be to this groene bladeren’ (p. 363). (London: Royal Geographical Society, armadillos were in collectors’ cabinets
edition of the report. 118 Herckmans, p. 359. 1997), p. 156. throughout Europe by this time. They were

known to come from Brazil and were often two countries that claim the name ‘Congo’: names and underneath a short description. Brazilian Slavery (Chicago: University of
included as a main attribute in allegorical the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly All were drawn as seen by myself to please Illinois Press, 1992), p. 41.
images of America. called Zaire, and the Congo, both of which and to oblige inquisitive minds. In Brazil 30 Wagener, p. 218. Whitehead and Boeseman
142 Mason, ‘Portrayal and Betrayal’, p. 58. fall into the area formerly indicated by the under the Honourable Government of call this image ‘a masterpiece of protest art’
143 Only one figure in the Tapuya Dance has the title Angola. His Excellency and Lord Johan Moritz of (p. 75). Although Wagener may have had an
same sort of facial decorations. 11 Baumunk argues that the gesture is meant Nassau etc. Governor Captain and Admiral anti-slavery agenda, his comments about the
144 See Ehb23 and Ehb 24 in the collection of to be read as erotic (p. 193). Mason states, by Zacharias Wagener of Dresden’, as quoted ‘stubborn and obstinate nature’ (hartnäckiger
the Nationalmuseet. These objects are not ‘the ear of corn points literally toward the in translation by Whitehead and Boesemen endt wiederwärtiger Natur) of the black
listed in the inventories until the eighteenth woman’s vagina in an unmistakably phallic (p. 49). African slaves in Brazil suggests that his
century, making a connection to Johan gesture’ (‘Portrayal and Betrayal’, 1989, p. 54). 18 Wagener, p. 218, n. 310 and n. 313. Negro sympathy was limited. See Wagener, p. 174.
Maurits less likely. Whitehead and Boeseman call the bird a and negra were colour terms borrowed from The German is from an earlier reproduction
145 Baumunk notes the biblical implications of ‘red-faced lovebird (Agapornis pullaria)’, p. 75. Spanish into Dutch and Germans and meant of this work (Zacharias Wagener, Zoobiblion,
the snake and the Garden of Eden. See also 12 Whitehead and Boeseman, p. 74. black or dark brown. See Forbes, p. p. 79. livro de animais do Brasil, vol. 4, Brasiliense
Mason, ‘Portrayal and Betrayal’. 13 The cloth now appears to be black and white, 19 Wagener, p. 174. Documenta, ed. E. de C. Falcão (São Paulo,
but the pigments here include smalt, suggest- 20 Ibid. 1964), p. 218.)
ing that the original colour was blue and 21 Zo wijd de wereld strekt, p. 137. 31 Wagener, p. 174.
white (conservation report, Nationalmuseet, 22 Wagener, p. 175. 32 This is one of seven surviving paintings that
Chapter 5 Copenhagen). Blue and white striped cloth is 23 Gerald Cardoso, Negro Slavery in the Sugar Post made in Dutch Brazil under Johan
described by various travelers to Africa in the Plantations of Veracruz and Pernambuco 1550- Maurits’s patronage.
1 The part of this chapter that addresses early modern period. 1680: A Comparative Study (Washington, D.C.: 33 Like the Tupis/Brasilianen, the male slaves
Eckhout’s Africans was previously published 14 Her palm tree is identified as a Brazilian wax University Press of America, 1983), p. 78. are often dressed in white shorts or pants, and
in an earlier version as ‘Albert Eckhout’s palm (Copernicia prunifera) in Zo wijd de wereld 24 Postma, p. 21 (table 1.1). Slaves were needed the women wear white skirts and often carry
paintings of the ‘wilde natien’ of Brazil and streekt (The Hague: Stichting Johan Maurits for the recovery and expansion of the sugar baskets on their heads. The overlaps are espe-
Africa’, NKJ 53 (2002): pp. 107-137. See also van Nassau, 1979), p. 137 and by Whitehead industry, which had been disrupted during the cially apparent in the engravings, based on
chapter 5 of Brienen, ‘Art and Natural and Boeseman (p. 75). His African date palm Dutch conquest of Brazil. The total number drawings by Post, for Barlaeus’s 1647 history
History’. (Phoenix dactylifera) is identified as such by of slaves that left Africa for Brazil was 31,533, of Dutch Brazil, Rerum per octennium in Brasilia.
2 See Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Whitehead and Boeseman (p. 73). Only with 5,247 dying during the middle passage. 34 Kolfin, p. 23-25.
Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Valladares and Mello Filha insist that her 25 Pierre Moreau, Klare en Waarachtige 35 During the seventeenth century, the Gold
Civilization, 2nd. ed., trans. Samuel Putnam location is Africa, because they recognize the Beschryving van de leste beroerten en afval der Coast denoted a region along the coast of
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). water behind her as ‘belonging to an estuary Portugezen in Brasil (Amsterdam, 1649). present-day Ghana, in between Senegal
The glossary includes a number of different of the Congo river’. See Albert Eckhout, pintor 26 This illustrates Theodor de Bry’s edition and the Cameroon (Postma, p. 57). Further
terms for racial mixtures in Brazil. de Mauríco de Nassau no Brasil 1637-1644 of Girolamo Benzoni’s account of Spanish information may be found in Ray A. Kea,
3 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Rio de Janeiro: Livroarte Editora, 1981), America, part five of the Grands Voyages Settlements, Trade and Politics on the Gold Coast
(New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 38. p. 137. series. (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins U. Press,
On the ‘contact zone’, see Pratt, pp. 6-7. 15 See Sybille Pfaff, Zacharias Wagener (1614- 27 Elmer Kolfin, Van de slavenzweep en de muze: 1982) and Kwame Yeboa Daaku’s Trade and
4 Bhabha, p. 36-37. 1668) (Dissertation, Otto-Friedrich twee eeuwen verbeelding van slavernij in Politics on the Gold Coast, 1600-1720 (Oxford,
5 Ibid., p. 36. University, Bamburg, 1997); copyright, Suriname (Leiden: KITLV, 1997). Claredon Press, 1970).
6 Ibid., p. 38. Hassfurt, 2001. 28 Images of slave women in the Americas with 36 The first military operation on foreign soil
7 Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in 16 Dante Martins Teixeira, introduction to jewels become more frequent from the end of undertaken by Johan Maurits after he became
Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, The ‘Thierbuch’ and ‘Autobiography’ of Zacharias the seventeenth century. See, for example, the the governor of Dutch Brazil was the con-
1995). Wagener. illustration ‘Negers speelende op Kalabassen’ quest of this Portuguese fort of Elmina on the
8 Ibid., p. 9. 17 The full title reads: ‘Animal book in which (Blacks playing calabashes) in Johan Nieuhof, Gold Coast of Guinea. Johan Maurits wanted
9 Van den Boogaart, ‘Slow Progress of Colonial are many different kinds of fish, birds, quadru- Gedenkweerdige Brasilianese zee- en lant-reize to ensure a steady supply of slaves for the
Civility’, p. 402 and B. Dam-Mikkelsen and pends, worms, fruits of the ground and trees (Amsterdam, 1682). colony. However, the slaves from this region
T. Lundbæk, Ethnographic Objects in the such as you can now and again find and see 29 The historian Stuart Schwartz states that did not prove satisfactory, resulting in the
Royal Danish Kunstkammer 1650-1800 in the Brazilian region and lands of the West ‘Physical conditions on Bahian egenhos [sugar 1641 Dutch conquest and occupation of the
(Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet, 1980), p. 42. India Company, and which are therefore plantations] were extremely poor: lack of important slave depot Luanda, whose African
10 See Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the foreign and not known in German lands. clothing, inadequate housing, poor nutrition, slaves (drawn from the Congo region) were
Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Cambridge They are depicted in precise manner and in harsh discipline and cruel punishments’. considered to be more suitable for work in
U. Press, 1990), p. 57. There are currently natural color, together with their proper See Slaves, Peasants and Rebels: Reconsidering the sugar plantations in Brazil.

37 Pieter de Marees, Description and Historical was published by de Bry in his Petit Voyages, and Mads Chrs. Christensen, ‘Albert Eck- 51 Thomsen refers to him this way, and in the
Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea, which includes a reversed copy of this image. hout’s Brazilian Paintings’ in Conservation exhibition catalogue, Zo wijd de wereld streekt,
trans. Albert van Dantzig and Adam Jones For a translation in modern Dutch see Om de of the Iberian and Latin American Cultural he is called a ‘negro warrior’ (negerstrijder),
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Zuid: De Eerste Schipvaart naar Oost-Indië Heritage, ed. H.W.M. Hodges et al. (London: p. 136.
Unless otherwise indicated, all references will onder Cornelis de Houtman, 1595-97, opgetekend J.S. Mills and P. Smith, 1992): pp. 1-5 and 52 Whitehead and Boeseman note the formal
be to this translation. door Willem Lodewycksz, trans. Vibeke Roeper K. Tams and Westerudd, ‘Restaurering af dress of other African dignitaries depicted
38 The region received its name from the highly and Diederick Wildeman (Nijmegen: SUN, to oliemalerier malet af holaenderen Albert by Eckhout (p. 74). See also de Marees (1987),
lucrative European-African trade in gold. 1997), p. 7. Eckhout 1641 i Brasilien’, Nationalmuseets p. 92.
However, this area also supplied slaves to 44 De Marees states that the people of Guinea Arbejdsmark (1977), pp. 7-13. 53 In the caption for his image of the Brazilian
European traders. Another important early are ‘very clever at making weapons, such as 47 I agree with Whitehead and Boeseman (p. 73) slave market, Wagener refers back to his
account is the Italian Filippo Pigafetta’s long Poniards [swords], an Ell long, without a who assert that while the African palm tree illustration of the African man, which he calls
Relatione del reame di Congo (1591) based on cross-bar, they are four fingers broad, double- had possibly already been introduced into ‘the image of a black from Guinea’ (der Figur
interviews with the Portuguese explorer edged, with a wooden hilt and pommel at the Brazil, the tree here does not appear to have eines Guineschen Mohrens). See Wagener
Duarte Lopez. This illustrated account end; they cover the hilt with gold leaf or the been painted from a living example. This type (1964), p. 224; (1997), p. 195.
was translated into a number of European skin of a kind of Fish...they make their scab- of palm is also represented in the background 54 This gives her appearance an eastern flavor,
languages quite early, including Dutch. bards of Dog- or Goat-skin, and at the top of of Crispijn de Passe de Oude’s engraving of possibly a reference to North African Muslims.
A useful English edition is A Report of the the Scabbard, near the opening, they tie a big Africa, discussed below. This is suggested by Erich Köllmann et al
Kingdom of Congo and of the Surrounding red Shell, about a hand broad, which is also 48 De Marees, 1987, p. 231. It is nonetheless in the entry ‘Erdteile’ in Reallexikon zur
Countries, trans. Margarite Hutchinson held in great esteem amongst them’ (1987, possible that de Marees may also have been a Deutschen Kunstgeschichte, ed. E. Gall,
(London: Frank Cass, 1970). p. 92). Van Dantzig and Jones note that the source for this choice of hairstyle. An illustra- L.H. Heydenreich and H.M. Frhr. von Ertfa
39 Ernst van den Boogaart, ‘The Trade Between fish skin was probably a ray, like that repre- tion for his chapter on Benin shows eight (Stuttgart: Alfred Druckemüller Verlag, 1967),
Western African and the Atlantic World, sented in Eckhout’s painting and used for different hairstyles for men, including hair p. 1174.
1600-90: Estimates of Trends in Composition the sheath of the Akan sword, possibly owned that is worn below the ears, which is labeled 55 Iconologia of Uijtbeeldinghen des Verstandst van
and Value’, Journal of African History 33 by Johan Maurits, and now in the collection the hairstyle worn by men who are soldiers Cesare Ripa van Peruigien (Amsterdam, 1644),
(1992): pp. 369-385. of the National Museum in Copenhagen. or captains. pp. 604-605. Unless otherwise noted, all
40 See the illustration for chapter thirty-nine The shells in this painting were identified by 49 Johan Maurits also had a private collection subsequent references will be to this edition.
for the illustration of the woman; the man Boeseman and Whitehead (p. 73). of ivory tusks and furniture made from ivory, 56 This is a long-held stereotype that continues
is shown on the left in the illustration for 45 According to Doran H. Ross, this painting which he shipped back to the Netherlands in into the present day. See Jan Nederveen
chapter six. illustrates ‘what is certainly an Akan state 1644. Whitehead and Boeseman assert that Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa
41 Cape Lopez is located on the coast of what sword’. See ‘The Iconography of Asante the tusk refers to this ivory. While the tusk and Blacks in Western Popular Culture
is now the African nation Gabon, which was Sword Ornaments’ in African Arts IX, 1 may have belonged to Johan Maurits, I am (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
part of ‘lower Guinea’ or Benin in the seven- (1977): p.16. Also see René Bravmann, not convinced of an intended connection. See also Sander L. Gilman, ‘Black Bodies,
teenth century. It was not part of the Gold ‘The State Sword - A Pre-Ashanti Tradition’, The exchange of gifts was part of the standard White Bodies: Toward an Iconography of
Coast, although it was an area frequented by Ghana Notes and Queries 10 (1968): pp. 1-4 negotiation process as practiced by both the Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art,
Dutch traders. and A. van Dantzig, ‘A Note on ‘the State VOC and the WIC during this period. Medicine, and Literature’ in ‘Race,’ Writing,
42 He is described as a ‘common inhabitant Sword – A Pre-Ashanti Tradition’, Ghana 50 These African objects were probably included and Difference (Chicago: University of
as he goes about every day and trades with Notes and Queries 11 (1970): pp. 47-48. in Johan Maurits’s gift to his cousin King Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 223-261.
foreigners, bringing elephant tusks for sale’ 46 Earlier restorers of this painting suggested Frederick of Denmark in 1654, a gift that 57 Leo (ca 1492-ca 1555) was a converted
(p. 236), but her status is left unclear. that his hair represents a later addition, which also included all of the paintings by Eckhout Muslim. His description of Africa, first
43 Eckhout’s African man may also make refer- is disputed by conservator Barbara Berlowicz now in the collection of the National published in Latin and French in Antwerp in
ence to the central male figure in the illustra- of the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen, who Museum in Copenhagen, formerly the 1556 and translated into English in 1600 as
tion of the inhabitants of Madagascar, included asserts that Eckhout painted the ethnographic Danish Royal Kunstkammer. For discussion A Geographical Historie of Africa, was both
in chapter 10 of Willem Lodewycksz’s portraits in stages, incorporating changes and of this gift, see Thomsen (pp. 1-19) and popular and highly influential throughout
description of the voyage to the East Indies additions as he went along. Furthermore, Joppien (pp. 322-325). See the Akan sword western Europe. It was reprinted in various
under Cornelis de Houtman, published in the slaves in the woodcut of the sugar mill with a ray skin sheath (ECb8), on display in editions and forms into the 19th century.
1598 as Historie van Indiën, waer inne verhaelt in the Historia naturalis brasiliae have exactly the ‘ethnographic treasure room’ in the For a discussion of his influence, see Kim
is de avontueren die de Hollandtsche Schepen the same hair style, as does Wagener’s copy National Museum, Copenhagen. This sword, Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race
bejeghent zijn. In the text, the inhabitants are from circa 1641. For information on the which lacks the oyster shell decoration, is and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca:
described as ‘black’, and the cloth they wear is conservation of these works and the painter’s illustrated by Dam-Mikkelsen and Lundbæk Cornell University Press), pp. 28-40. In a
striped. An abridged version of this account methods, see Ruth Baier, Barbara Berlowicz, (p. 56). series of prints of the four parts of the world

reproduced by Adriaen Collaert after Maarten with fertility in general. See Crispijn de Nelly Van den Abbeele, The Power of Head- 73 This is taken from his 1647 map of Brazil,
de Vos, Africa makes the following statement: Passe’s version, (Hollstein, vol XLVI, p. 165) dresses. A Cross-Cultural Study of Forms and which is also included in Johannes Blaeu’s
‘Ik doe de schepsels zich vermenigvuldigen, in which a nude Venus is fondled by an Functions (Brussels: Tendi, 1985) and Mary Jo world atlases from this period.
breng steeds iets nieuws ter wereld, en amorous male companion, while Bacchus Arnoldi and Christine Mullen Kramer, 74 See plate 104 in Wagener’s Thierbuch.
bevrucht zonder regen mijn zaad’ (as quoted pours wine and Ceres looks on. ‘Ohn wein Crowning Achievements: African Arts of Dressing 75 Mason, ‘Portrayal and Betrayal’, p. 55. See
by Vandenbroek, p. 22). und broth leidt Venus noth’ is written upon the Head (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of also Ivan Gaskell, ‘Tobacco, Social Deviance,
58 Baumunk has suggested a connection between the wine barrel behind Venus. Art, 1995). For a recent examination of the and Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century’
this illustration in Ripa and Eckhout’s painting 66 Dam-Mikkelsen and Lundbæk state that the complexities surrounding the African in Looking at Seventeenth Century Dutch Art,
of the African woman, suggesting that a simi- design of these baskets suggests that they woman’s hat, and the suggestion that it is p. 75. This article points to a connection
lar gesture is made by the child in Eckhout’s were from an area around the mouth of the made of pangolin skin not plant fiber, see between smoking and sexual license, noting
painting. See, for example, the illustration of Congo river (p. 50). See also Whitehead and Espen Waehle, ‘From the Enigma of the Hat the prominent display of pipes in the comic
Lust in the Dutch edition of Ripa, p. 143. Boeseman, pp. 74-75. The basket held by the of the ‘Negro Woman’ to New Perspectives and moralizing works of artists like Jan Steen.
Baumunk, p. 198, n. 32. I am not convinced of woman is very similar in design to the two on Albert Eckhout and Dutch Brazil’ in Albert I would like to thank E. Kolfin for pointing
this connection. Baumunk cites E. de Jongh’s baskets (Ehc37; Ehc38) in the collection of Eckhout Returns to Brazil: International Experts out the connection between pipes and black
article ‘Erotica om vogelperspectief. De National Museum in Copenhagen, which Symposium (São Paulo, 2002), pp. 361-365. slaves during the early modern period.
dubbelzinnigheit van een reeks 17de eeuwse are also illustrated in Dam-Mikkelsen and 68 See Relatione del reame di Congo et delle circon- See, for example, Wagener’s images of pipe-
genre voorstellingen’. Simiolus (1968-69): Lundbæk, p. 50. Although one of these vicine contrade, tratta dalli scritti & ragionamen- smoking slaves carrying a Portuguese woman
pp. 22-74. Mason also suggests that the bird baskets was part of Olé Worm’s collection ti di Odoardo Lopez, Portoghese (Rome, 1591); in his Thier Buch and other images of pipe-
may refer to the early modern Dutch term in 1653, a connection to Johan Maurits for editions circulated in multiple European smoking Africans by Frans Post. In Valken-
‘vogelen’, meaning to fornicate (‘Portrayal the other basket does not seem improbable. languages. Pigafetta states that certain burg’s Slave Dance (1707-1709), tobacco pipes
and Betrayal’, pp. 54-55). 67 Since 1980, scholars have repeated Dam- military officers wear ‘a cap ornamented are also prominently displayed. See also the
59 Ripa, p. 143. Each of the four continents has Mikkelsen and Lundbæk’s assertion that the with cock’s, ostrich’s, peacock’s, and other discussion of tobacco and representations of
an animal attribute. For example, America is hat she wears is ‘of an oriental type which feathers’ (Pigafetta, 1970, p. 36). Pigafetta blacks, mostly from the eighteenth and nine-
usually shown with an armadillo, although an Dutch merchants had brought from Asia to also mentions that the king of the Congo teenth centuries, in Pieterse, pp. 188-192.
alligator occasionally replaces the armadillo. their allies in the Sohio kingdom at the mouth raises peacocks. See also the illustrations to 76 Her basket contains a melon, citrus fruit,
This is similar to the relationship between of the Congo’ (p. 42), a statement based on this work, which include figures with peacock and bananas, which connects this image to
America and the armadillo, often of gigantic evidence of Dutch trade in peacock feathers feather decorated headdresses. Eckhout’s still lifes of Brazilian fruits, flowers,
proportions, which accompanies the conti- from the East Indies with Sonho (I would like 69 Contemporary documents attest to the and vegetables. However, bananas and citrus
nent in many contemporary illustrations. to thank Torben Lundbæk for clarifying this preference for slaves from Africa, especially fruits had already been introduced into Brazil
60 Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, point for me). It is far more probable that the Angola. See ‘Sommier Discours’, p. 292. Here as well as West Africa by the seventeenth
Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450-1700, vol. hat is of indigenous African manufacture, it states, ‘De slaven van Africa of van Angola century. Clay pipes from Gouda dominated
XLVI, part 2 (1995), 199 (plate 1398/1). given its pattern and mode of its construction, werden hier van de beste gehouden, deels om the pipe market in the Dutch Republic in the
61 Hollstein, Dutch and Flemish Etchings, vol. XV, with the peacock feathers added to address datse beter willen wercken, deels om datse, seventeenth century and were exported to
plate 599. the cosmopolitan tastes of the ruling elite in nieu overgecomen sijnde, beters vande oude various Dutch overseas colonies and trading
62 For an eighteenth-century example of this the Congo region. There are close similarities Negers leren, alsoo sij malcanderen van tale posts. For a general introduction to the
kind of stereotype, see Edward Long’s views between the colour and patterns of this hat verstaen’. subject, see Benedict Goes, 25 eeuwen roken,
as reproduced in his multivolume History of and those worn by the African dignitaries 70 See a WIC document from 1642 among de verwonderlijke vormgeving van de pijp
Jamaica (1774). An overtly racist text, he represented in other oil studies by Eckhout, Johan Maurits’s papers that addresses gift- (Leiden: Stichting Pijpenkabinet Leiden, 1993).
maintains that African women are ‘libidinous now in volume 3 of the Theatrum Rerum Natu- giving and the appropriate manner in which 77 See Pieter de Hooch’s Music Party (n.d.) in
and shameless as monkies’. ralium Brasiliae (A34) in the Libri Picturati to receive the King of the Congo (A4, the collection of the Statensmuseet,
63 De Marees (1987), p. 238. collection in Krakow. Thomas Thomsen also Johan Maurits Archive, vol 1454, p. 203. Copenhagen. Two of the women in this genre
64 Reproduced as fig. 266 in E.J. Sluijter, draws attention to the similarities in the bee- Koninklijk Huisarchief (KHA), The Hague). scene wear pearl necklaces and pearl drop
‘Venus, Visus en Pictura’, Nederlands Kunst- hive-shaped headdresses worn by the figures 71 Barlaeus, p. 316. In a letter dated 12 May earrings with red bows.
historisch Jaarboek (1991-1992): pp. 42-43. in Eckhout’s oil studies and the one worn by 1642, Dom Garcia, the King of the Congo, 78 Whitehead and Boeseman state that this
65 See the entry for ‘Demeter’ in Jane D. Reid, one of the king’s wives from the kingdom of made a gift to Johan Maurits of two hundred African bird species can be found in both
The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Juda, in the Guinea region, as illustrated in slaves and a silver platter, now used as a present-day Angola and Ghana (p. 75).
Arts, 1300-1990s, vol. 1 (New York, Oxford Voyage du Chevalier des Marchas de Guinée, ed. baptismal patter in the Evangelische Nikolai- His body is quite similar to that of the child
U. Press, 1993), p. 337. The Roman goddess Père Labat (Paris, 1739), vol. 2, plate 243. Kirchengemeinde in Siegen. As cited in in the de Marees illustration of the peoples of
Ceres (also Demeter) was the goddess of corn For discussion and representations of African Zo wijd de wereld streekt, p. 147, fig. 166. Cape Lopez. Corn was one of the first crops
and agriculture and was therefore associated hats in general, see Daniel P. Biebuyk and 72 Whitehead and Boeseman, p. 75. introduced into Europe from the New World,

and it was also present in West Africa by the the addition of further detail (the jewelry, ‘native’ women and the colonists. In Andrew 107 De Marees (1987), p. 217. In Dutch it reads,
seventeenth century. the child, the vegetation, the basket, etc.)’. Battell’s account of travel to Africa from ‘[The Portuguese] nemen tot hunnen
79 The other image that has extant studies is the See Mason, Infelicities, pp. 44-45. 1589, reproduced by Samuel Purchas in Wyven veel cloecke swertinnen of Melatos,
painting of the Tapuya woman. 88 Mason, Infelicities, p. 44. Purchas his Pilgrimage (London, 1625), he half witte ende half swerte (te weten geel-
80 These images may be found in volume 3 of 89 Ibid., pp. 60-61. states that ‘they [the Portuguese] rejoyce achtighe) doen de Porteguesen seer veel
the Theatrum rerum Naturalium (A32-35) in 90 Andrew Battell states, ‘The children of this when they have a Mulatto child, though it af houwen, dan deur dien dat sy die niet
the Libri Picturati in Kraków. country [Africa] are borne white, and change be a bastard’ (vol. II, p. 981). heel vast trouwen en moghen, so coopense
81 Scholars have suggested that these images their colour in two days to a perfect blacke’ 98 Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White; dese Vrouwen, ende achtense also veel als
were made during a visit by the ambassadors (as cited by Purchas (1625), vol II, p. 980). Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the hun eyghen Vrouwen te zijn, nochtans
to Dutch Brazil in 1642/1643. However, the 91 De Marees (1987), p. 26. The Dutch reads: United States (New York: Macmillian, 1971), moghen sy doen afscheyden alst hun ghe-
connection with Eckhout’s painting suggests ‘de ionghe kinderen eerst gheboren synde sijn p. 229. lieft, ende mogen wederom andre vrouwen
an earlier date, between 1637 and 1641. niet geheel swart, maer rosachtich, als de 99 Naturally, the forts along the west coast coopen als het hun te pas comt: Dese
Christianity was the dominant religion of the Bresillianen’. See Pieter de Marees, Beschry- of Africa that were established by the Vrouwen onderhouden sy seer practich,
upper classes in the Congo, adopted through vinhe ende historische verhael van het Gout Portuguese provided venues for social and ende fray in haere cleedinghe, de selve altijt
trade contacts with the Portuguese in the koninckrijck van Gunea anders de Gout-Custe de sexual contact with the local inhabitants, meer oppronckende ende uytstekende als
fifteenth century, which explains the crosses Mina genaemt liggende in het deel van Africa, resulting in groups of mixed Portuguese/ eenighe andre Inlantsche vrouwen, so datse
and rosary beads that most of these figures ed. S.P.L’Honore Naber (The Hague: African children. haest te keenen sijn’ (de Marees, 1912, pp.
wear. M. Nijhoff, 1912), p. 25. Contemporary 100 Forbes, p. 149. 224-225).
82 Most of the paper used for the oil studies is discussions of the blackness of African skin 101 Forbes, p. 173. Forbes argues that for the 108 De Marees (1987), p. 220.
irregular in size. This image measures 35.5 x assert that the black colour is the result of the Spanish this term was not limited to African/ 109 See Whitehead and Boeseman, pp. 73-74 and
24 x 36 x 24 cm. intense sunlight of Africa. Barlaeus cites this European mixtures but was also applied to Valladares and de Mello Filho, pp. 135-136.
83 As Mason notes, this object is unidentifiable argument, but disagrees with it (pp. 75-76). the children whose parents were Amerindian 110 Other images offer a better view of the
(Infelicities, p. 45), although it has been called The variety of skin colour among the African and African. sword, which exactly matches the one held
various things in the literature, including a slaves in Brazil is recorded by Wagener in this 102 My retranslation of a quotation reproduced by Eckhout’s mulatto man and was probably
‘pot’ (Ehrenreich, p. 85) and a ‘sugar loaf’ image of a ‘Slave Dance’ in which the woman by Forbes, p. 174. The English translation standard issue to all musketeers. The caption
(Whitehead and Boeseman, p. 171). right of the center has much lighter skin than given by Forbes leaves out the important for this image, the first illustration of
84 During the 1660s, Mentzel, physician of the the rest of the figures (plate 105 in Thierbuch). gender distinctions. This quote is taken from ‘Schutten’, explains that the gun must be
Elector of Brandenburg, arranged Eckhout’s 92 Wagener notes that black children born in C. Oudin, Den Grooten Dictionaris en Schat carried on the left shoulder and held in the
drawings into albums. Brazil are called ‘Creoles’. van Drij Talen (Antwerp, 1639-40). ‘Moor’ left hand.
85 Ehrenreich agreed she was Indian, but said 93 See Patrick Wolfe, ‘Land, Labor, and is a term long used in Europe to describe 111 Caspar Schmalkalden, Die wundersamen
that she was a ‘küsten Tupiweib’ (p. 85). Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’, ‘negros’ and those with black skin; there Reisen des Caspar Schmalkalden nach West- und
In his reproduction of this drawing, Glaser American Historical Review 106/3 (June 2001): are cognates of this word in every major Ost-Indien (1642-52), ed. W. Joost (Leipzig:
kept the Mentzel’s title ‘Tapuya woman’. pp. 866-905. European language. Brockhaus, 1983), p. 46. Schmalkalden’s
See O. Glaser, Prinz. Johann Moritz von 94 The poem is reproduced in volume II of 103 See De Beschryvinghe van ‘t groot ende manuscript includes images copied from
Nassau-Siegen und die niederlandischen Kolonien Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and vermaert Coninckrijk van Congo (Leiden, Eckhout and from the Historia. It is now in
in Brasilien (Berlin, 1938). Commericial, of the British Colonies in the West 1596), p. 59. the collection of the Forschungsbibliothek
86 I noted in 1996 that they shared the same leg Indies (Philadelphia, 1806). 104 Ibid. in Gotha.
position, during my first examination of these 95 See Young, pp. 1-28. 105 Barlaeus, p. 76. 112 See Johan Maurits to Resident Le Maire in
drawings at the Jagiellon Library in Kraków. 96 Soler, p. 43. 106 De Marees (1987), p. 36. The Dutch reads Copenhagen, 26 July 1679, A4, 1477, KHA,
See also Mason, Infelicities, pp. 44-45. 97 See C. R. Boxer, Race Relations in the ‘A is een Porteguesen vrouw, wonende op The Hague. Resident Le Maire to Johan
However, the burnt orange colour of her Portuguese Colonial Empire (1415-1825) het Casteel d’Mina, die half swert ende half Maurits in Kassel, 2 Sept. 1679, A4, 1477,
closely cropped hair is certainly in contrast (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963) and Freyre. wit van wesen is, ende gheelachtich, die sy KHA, The Hague.
with both the blackish brown hair of the Similarly, Hemming insinuates that the noemen Melato, ende meest tot hunnne 113 Wagener (1997), p. 180. His ‘Excellency’
Amerindians and the black hair of the Portuguese set out to ‘breed’ half-caste vrouwe houdende zijn, want de witte vrouwen refers to Johan Maurits, the governor-
Africans. mamelucs (p. 93), although he asserts that daer niet aerden en mueghen, dese chieren general of the colony. The German reads:
87 Mason suggests that this image prepares ‘the after the sixteenth century, most mixing haer lichaem heel fray met cleedinghe, en ‘zu ihren Jahren kommende sich in allerley
way not for one composition but for a series occurred between white men and black behanghen hun lyf met veel Coralen, Pater- Händelen gebrauchen lassen, wissen mit
of compositions...this implies a high degree women (p. 175). Sixteenth- and seventeenth- nosters, sy scheren hun hayr opt hooft heel allerley Gewehr, sonderlich Springardos,
of indeterminacy, a relatively unspecific form century travel accounts also suggest that the cort af, als de Mans doen, meynende dat het wohl umbzugehen, undt lauffen täglich auss,
that becomes increasingly specific through Portuguese encouraged contact between the hun heel verciert’ (de Marees, 1912, p. 36). Vogel undt Wild zu schiessen, unterstehen

undt in verborgenen Sträuchern Menschen Hals, Ohren undt Hände mit allerley bunten Mason argues that the image of the mameluco 14 See Bente Gundestup, ‘The Eckhout Paintings
zu treffen, wie solches genügsamb bekandt schlechten Steinen undt Corallen, dass deren conveys a ‘more Europeanised sensuality’ and the Royal Danish Kunstkammer. History
undt offenbar, beydes unter den Portugiesen etzliche wegen ihrer hübschen Gestalt vor (‘Portrayal and Betrayal’, p. 55). of the Collections’ in Albert Eckhout volta ao
also den unseren, dess wegen sie undt Spanische Jungfrauwen angeshen werden. 139 In comparison to the Amerindians, these Brasil (Copenhagen, 2002), pp. 103-115.
allewegs für leichtfertige, falsche undt Die Mannspersonen sindt geneigt, sich in paintings, especially those of the Africans, 15 As addressed by Sousa-Leao, the paintings
verrätherische Buben geacht undt gehalten allerley ehrliche Geschäffte oder löbliche have received relatively little scholarly of the Africans were traditionally ascribed
werden. Sein Excell. hat dieselben für Kreigshändel zu begeben, darinnen zu üben attention. to Eckhout until the discovery in 1959 by
dieses, weil sie von Christlichen Geblühte undt gebrauchen zu lassen. Der Töchter 140 Van den Boogaart, ‘Slow Progress of J.A. Gonsalves de Mello of a document
herrühren, alzumahl freygeben wollen; wie werden viel an dieselbe Arth verheirhtet, Colonial Civility’, p. 402. from the Zeeland chamber of the WIC that
er aber hernach von ihren bösen, untreuen andere aber undt fast der meiste Theil 141 See Ernst van den Boogaart, ‘The Empress suggested that they were actually painted by
Leben besser unterrichtet worden, hat ihm, werden recht, ehrlich undt unehrlich von Europe and her Three Sisters’, pp. 121-128. Jasper Bexc (p. 13, n. 6). A contemporary copy
solches zu thun, Bedenken geben’ (as quoted bisweilen sehr reichen Portugiesen, undt was made of the main figure; it was formerly
by Thomsen, p. 163). auch wohl con etzlichen weibersüchtigen in private hands in Germany and has now
114 See Kolfin’s discussion of eighteenth-century Niederländern, zu trauwen versuchet’ been sold to a Brazilian collector. S. Nystad
images of slaves in Surinam. (as quoted by Thomsen, p. 164). Chapter 6 reviewed the evidence and argued that
115 Whitehead and Boeseman, p. 73. 125 ‘Een Maeghdeken met een witte dunne Eckhout was in fact the author of these works.
116 Or, as Freyre puts it, ‘White woman for sluyer gekleet, met een vrolijck opsicht, 1 An earlier, much shorter version of this See S. Nystad, ‘Johan Maurits, Albert Eckhout
marriage, mulatto woman for f-, Negro hebbende in de rechter hand een Roose, chapter was published as ‘Albert Eckhout’s en de gezant van Sonho’, Tableau Musea-
woman for work’ (p. 13). en op ‘t hooft een krans met bloemen’ Paintings and the Vrijburg Palace in Dutch Kunsthandel-Exposities 20 (1980): pp. 80-85.
117 Forbes, p. 129. (Ripa, p. 38). Brazil’, Albert Eckhout returns to Brazil, Nystad reproduces excerpts from the essential
118 Ibid., p. 103. 126 It includes images of queens, young 1644-2002 (Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet, documents in this short article.
119 Arnoldus Montanus, De nieuwe en onbekende noble women, and wives and daughters of 2002), pp. 81-91. A more extensive early 16 Christensen, pp. 211-212. See also Baier,
weereld: of Beschryving van America en ’t outstanding citizens, all represented as version is included as chapter 6 of my disser- Berlowicz, and Christensen.
Zuid-land (Amsterdam, 1671), p. 532. shepherdesses. tation (Brienen, “Art and Natural History”, 17 Given the colonial location, such a system may
120 ‘de gracieuze mestiezenvrouw met een totaal 127 Reid, p. 434. 2002). also reflect the economical use of canvas. I
afunctioneel bloemenmandje’ (Vandenbroek, 128 As reproduced by Held (see below). 2 For a more complete discussion regarding thank Claudia Swan for making this suggestion.
p. 38). 129 Julius S. Held, ‘Flora, Goddess and why the Maurtishuis was an improbable 18 However, the seven other still lifes demon-
121 This is the Heliconia, a plant related to the Courtesan’ in De Artibus Opuscola XL: Essays location for these works of art see chapter 6 strate two other forms of preparation, which
bird of paradise (Whitehead and Boeseman, in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss in Brienen, “Art and Natural History”, 2002. suggests that they were made in different
p. 73). (New York: New York University Press, 3 J.J. Terwen, ‘The Buildings of Johan Maurits batches. See Christensen, p. 213.
122 Although it has been suggested that a streak 1961). Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky van Nassau’ in Johan Maurits van Nassau- 19 Bananas were widely cultivated along the
of white paint on her left hand represents (New York: New York University Press, Siegen, p. 96. Guinea coast. Recent research on bananas
a ring, this seems unlikely after closer 1961), pp. 201-218. 4 See Buvelot’s discussion, pp. 32-33. has demonstrated that the wild species had a
examination. 130 Ibid., p. 213. 5 Berlowicz (2002); Egmond and Mason, 2004. much wider area of origin than previously
123 Whitehead and Boeseman say that it is a 131 Ibid., p. 212. 6 Whitehead and Boeseman, pp. 65, 79. thought; they were present in both Indonesia
blue hat, but it appeared green when I made 132 ‘Cuniculorum Brasiliensium variae species,’ Berlowicz, ‘Albert Eckhout’s Paintings – and India. The yellow banana is a cultivated
a close examination of this painting in June Historia, p. 223. Interpretation of Content and Technique’, version of the wild species, which are red or
1999. 133 Handbook I, reproduced as Libri Principis, in Albert Eckhout volta ao Brasil (Copenhagen, green in colour. See the entry for ‘banana’
124 Wagener (1997), p. 181. The original vol 1, in Brasil-Holandês/Dutch-Brazil (1995), 200), p. 201 (see endnote 1). in Alan Davidson, Oxford Companion to Food
German reads: ‘Von Brasilianischen Weiber vol. 2, p. 9. Similarly, in his Thierbuch, 7 Christensen (Copenhagen, 2002), p. 211. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
mit ungebührlicher Vermischung beydes Wagener claims that a guinea pig ‘looks like 8 Ibid. pp. 54-55.
der Portugiesen undt Niederländer werden a rabbit’. 9 Egmond and Mason, p. 110. 20 Berlowicz (Copenhagen, 2002).
dieser Hurenkinder viel gebohren, unter 134 Ripa, p. 579. 10 Christensen (Copenhagen, 2002), p. 215. 21 My emphasis.
welchen bisweilen gar hübsche, zarte Manns- 135 Held, vol. II, p. 73, fig. 20. 11 Christensen (Copenhagen, 2002), p. 212. 22 ‘Sieben grosse Stueck Schildereyen mit
und Weibesbilder zu finden sindt; sie gehen 136 Van den Boogaart, ‘Slow Progress of 12 Ibid. Oelfarben, 7 brabantsche Ellen hoch, womit
gemeinglich in her Wochen mit schönen, Colonial Civility’, p. 403. 13 Dante Martins Teixeira, ‘The “Thierbuch” of als mit Tapeten ein grosser Saal behaengt
langen von Baumwoll gemachten Hemden 137 Mason, ‘Portrayal and Betrayal’, p. 49. Zacharias Wagener of Dresden (1614-1668) werden kann, worinn Indianer nach dem
daher, des Sonntags oder auff gemeinen 138 Boogaart states: ‘They are decently dressed and the Oil Paintings of Albert Eckhout’ in Leben und (nach dem Leben und in Lebens-
Festtagen aber bülzen sie sich gantz herrlich, albeit barefoot’( ‘Slow Progress of Colonial Albert Eckhout volta ao Brazil (Copenhagen, groesse gerepraesentiert werden, die Indianer
auff Spannische Weise herfür, behängen den Civility’, p. 402). See also Baumunk, p. 192. 2002), pp. 167-185. in unterschiedlichen Provincien mit allen in

* omslag Savage Paradise 01-11-2006 10:22 Pagina 1
Albert Eckhout was one of the earliest rebecca
rebecca parker brienen

trained European artists in the
Americas. For seven years (1637-1644) parker brienen
he was a painter at the colonial court
Visions
of governor-general Johan Maurits
van Nassau-Siegen in Dutch Brazil,
which was established by the Dutch
West India Company (WIC) in 1630.
Eckhout’s Brazilian paintings and
drawings include still lifes, oil studies
of Savage
of indigenous plants and animals,
and a remarkable ethnographic series,
that features Indians, Africans, and
Paradise
the first paintings of people of mixed
racial background.
Albert Eckhout,
Dr. Brienen answers the critical need for a new, book-length
Court Painter in
treatment of Eckhout’s oeuvre with this richly illustrated text, which Colonial Dutch Brazil
Visions of Savage Paradise

provides an up-to-date and in-depth analysis of the artist and his
Brazilian works. In this book, the author pays special attention to the
iconographic traditions that inform Eckhout’s paintings and further
explores the function of the works within the colonial context.
This book will not only be of interest to students and scholars of
seventeenth-century Dutch art, but it will also be an important
resource for those interested in visual anthropology, art and
exploration, and the history of the WIC.
Rebecca Parker Brienen is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the

University of Miami.
9 789053 569474
isbn-13 978 90 5356 947 4 isbn-10 90 5356 947 2 www.aup.nl
Amsterdam University Press Amsterdam University Press

* boek Savage Paradise 20-10-2006 05:32 Pagina 3
R e b e c c a Pa r k e r B r i e n e n
Visions of
Savage Paradise
Albert Eckhout,
Court Painter in
Colonial Dutch Brazil
amsterdam university press

The publication of this book was made possible by support from

the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Art and
Art History at the University of Miami and a grant from
the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
Cover design and lay out Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam

Cover illustration Albert Eckhout, African Woman and Child,
oil on canvas, 1641.
isbn-13 978 90 5356 947 4

isbn-10 90 5356 947 2
nur 640 / 654
© Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2006
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
In memory of Mary Lynn Parker

(1937-1986)
ta b l e o f c o n t e n t s
9 Acknowledgments
11 Introduction
chapter 1
27 Albert Eckhout (ca. 1607-1665/6)

Portrait and Still-life Painter at Johan Maurits’s Brazilian Court
chapter 2
47 ‘To Reproduce Nature Itself as Perfectly as Possible’

The Brazilian Natural History Drawings of Albert Eckhout
chapter 3
73 Cannibalizing America
From the Ethnographic Impulse to the Ethnographic Portrait
chapter 4
95 Between the Savage and the Civilized

Eckhout’s Brasilianen and Tapuyas
chapter 5
131 Black, Brown, and Yellow

Eckhout’s Paintings of Africans, Mestizos, and Mulattos
6
chapter 6
171 Eckhout’s Paintings

Location and Interpretation
201 Conclusion
208 colour plates
Appendix A
226 Chronological Overview of Albert Eckhout’s Life
Appendix B
228 Works of Art by Albert Eckhout
231 notes
266 bibliography
279 index of names
282 general index
286 list of illustrations
7
c o l o u r p l at e s
plate 1 – Albert Eckhout, Indian Man, ca. 1641, chalk on paper, Misc. Cleyeri; Libri picturati A38,
21.8 x 16.6 cm. Courtesy of the Jagiellon University Library, Kraków.
plate 2 – Albert Eckhout, Tapuya Woman, 1641, oil on canvas, 272 x 165 cm.
Courtesy of the Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen.
plate 3 – Albert Eckhout, Tapuya Man, 1641, oil on canvas, 272 x 161 cm.
plate 4 – Albert Eckhout, Tupinamba/Brasilian Woman and Child, 1641, oil on canvas,
274 x 163 cm. Courtesy of the Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen.
plate 5 – Albert Eckhout, Tupinamba/Brasilian Man, 1643, oil on canvas, 272 x 163 cm.
plate 6 – Albert Eckhout, African Woman and Child, 1641, oil on canvas, 282 x 189 cm.
plate 7 – Albert Eckhout, African Man, 1641, oil on canvas, 273 x 167 cm.
plate 8 – Albert Eckhout, Mulatto Man, ca. 1643, oil on canvas, 274 x 170 cm.
plate 9 – Albert Eckhout, Mameluca, 1641, oil on canvas, 271 x 170 cm.
plate 10 – Albert Eckhout, Still Life with Palm Inflorescence and Basket of Spices, ca. 1640,
oil on canvas, 82 x 85 cm. Courtesy of the Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen.
plate 11 – Albert Eckhout, Still Life with Watermelons, Pineapple, and Other Fruit, ca. 1640,
oil on canvas, 91 x 91 cm. Courtesy of the Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen.
plate 12 – Albert Eckhout, Still Life with Coconuts, ca. 1640, oil on canvas, 93 x 93 cm.
plate 13 – Albert Eckhout, Green Lizard over Chalk Drawing of a European Man,
chalk and oil on paper, 47 x 27 cm, Theatrum vol. III, f. 165. Libri picturati A34.
Courtesy of the Jagiellon University Library, Kraków.
plate 14 – Albert Eckhout, Fish (camuri, oil on paper, 33.3 x 17 cm,

Theatrum vol. I, f. 163, Libri picturati A34.
plate 15 – Albert Eckhout, Red Crabs, oil on paper, 33 x 17 cm, Theatrum vol. I, f. 357,
Libri picturati A34. Courtesy of the Jagiellon University Library, Kraków.
plate 16 – Georg Marcgaf, Lesser Anteater (tamandua tetradactyla),

watercolour and body colour on paper, 31 by 20 cm, Handbook I, f. 84, Libri picturati A32.
plate 17 – Albert Eckhout, Lesser Anteater (tamandua tetradactyla), oil on paper,

30.1 x 20.1 cm, Theatrum vol. III, f. 97, Libri picturati A34.

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R e b e c c a Pa r k e r B r i e n e n chapter 4

Visions of Between the Savage and the Civilized

Albert Eckhout, he best-known images in Albert Eckhout’s Brazilian

96 visions of savage paradise between the savage and the civilized 97

98 visions of savage paradise between the savage and the civilized 99

a marvelous strange wild and brutish people, without Fayth, without

Black, Brown, and Yellow

he colonization of parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas

132 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 133

134 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 135

fig. 43 – Theodor de Bry, African slaves working in a sugarmill, engraving.

black, brown, and yellow 141

144 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 145

black, brown, and yellow 147

148 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 149

152 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 153

154 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 155

Eckhout’s Mulatto Man

156 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 157

The people produced by relations between black women and Portuguese

black, brown, and yellow 159

160 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 161

162 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 163

very honestly and legitimately desired as legal wives, sometimes by fairly

164 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 165

166 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 167

168 visions of savage paradise black, brown, and yellow 169

246 visions of savage paradise notes chapter 4 247

248 visions of savage paradise notes chapter 4 249

250 visions of savage paradise notes chapter 4 251

252 visions of savage paradise notes chapter 5 253

254 visions of savage paradise notes chapter 5 255

256 visions of savage paradise notes chapter 5 257

258 visions of savage paradise notes chapter 5 259

260 visions of savage paradise notes chapter 6 261

Albert Eckhout was one of the earliest rebecca

rebecca parker brienen

Visions of Savage Paradise

Rebecca Parker Brienen is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the

isbn-13 978 90 5356 947 4 isbn-10 90 5356 947 2 www.aup.nl

Amsterdam University Press Amsterdam University Press

amsterdam university press

The publication of this book was made possible by support from

Cover design and lay out Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam

isbn-13 978 90 5356 947 4

© Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2006

In memory of Mary Lynn Parker

27 Albert Eckhout (ca. 1607-1665/6)

47 ‘To Reproduce Nature Itself as Perfectly as Possible’

95 Between the Savage and the Civilized

131 Black, Brown, and Yellow

171 Eckhout’s Paintings

208 colour plates

226 Chronological Overview of Albert Eckhout’s Life

228 Works of Art by Albert Eckhout

279 index of names

282 general index

286 list of illustrations

plate 14 – Albert Eckhout, Fish (camuri, oil on paper, 33.3 x 17 cm,