Aesthetic Ambition and the Realities of Conquest: Trading Memories of Dutch Brazil, 1630–54

In the mid-seventeenth century, European aristocracy and armchair travelers experienced first glimpses of an exotic “new” world—Dutch-held Pernambuco (1630-1654), in northeastern Brazil.  Prior to his 1638 transatlantic crossing from Amsterdam, governor-general Johan Maurits von Nassau-Siegen had commissioned art and naturalist observations of the colony’s capital city Recife, which he renamed Mauritstaad. These, along with his biography, were printed and distributed upon his return to the Netherlands in 1645. Yet even as Amsterdam’s presses worked overtime to meet the demand for textual and aesthetic output on Dutch Brazil, the colony reverted back to the Portuguese crown.

What was the imagination of Dutch Brazil? From the 1640s, Luso-Brazilians have cast the Nassovian years (1638-1645) as an interregnum. That is, Maurits’ tenure was marked by tenuous peace between two bouts of intense battle for independence from the Dutch (1630-1638; 1645-1654). The Dutch, however, marketed the memory of their rule as an interlude. Maurits commissioned esteemed Latin scholar Caspar van Baerle (Barleus) to write of his tenure in the tropics; “If the country were capable of speech and could address you, it would surrender itself to you,” wrote Barleus. And indeed, under Maurits’ direction Dutch West India Company (WIC) cartographers charted the southern skies; naturalists catalogued tropical flora and fauna; artists captured the people of Brazil and rendered heroic Dutch prowess in battle.

Yet Portuguese language accounts tell a story of simmering and outright malcontent. Maurits’ own letters to WIC directors reveal the terrible tension of the day. The colony was a financial drain on the WIC, and hastened its demise by the end of the seventeenth century.

This project will address the long-overlooked difference between the rhetoric and reality of Dutch Brazil. Nieuw Holland lasted less than thirty years, all of them turbulent.  What, then, led to the vision of a civilized, ordered colony under Dutch rule? The battle for northeast Brazil was hardly over when Maurits, a military-aesthete, journeyed with an artistic and scientific entourage across the Atlantic in 1638. Fighting continued, but commissioned artists, cartographers, artisans, and naturalists worked hard to document the beauty, exoticism, and Dutch order of the ephemeral colony. Why? What did this aesthetic impulse mean, and to whom? What are the implications of this narrative? This session will reveal that Dutch representations of the lived experience in Brazil resulted in the earliest commodification of historical memory, and that the impulse to package and sell an aesthetic vision of the failed colony was part of a broader proto-capitalist process.

Art historian Svetlana Alpers notes that in the seventeenth century, landschap, Dutch for landscape, meant “world described.” This poster session lends itself readily to a world imagined and described by the Dutch, the memory of which was then sold on the European market for the next few hundred years. The session will include visual reproductions of commissioned work, such as that of artists Frans Post and Albert Eckhout, both of whom “mapped” the landscape and bodies of Dutch Brazil for Maurits and the Dutch West India Company.