Frans Post

Frans Post executed the first European landscape paintings of the Americas during his residence in Dutch Brazil from 1636 to 1644. He traveled as part of the scientific entourage of Governor Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, who ruled the colony from its capital, Mauritsstad. Post produced at least seven signed and dated paintings in Brazil itself, the only works he created outside Europe. Upon his return to Haarlem, he painted approximately 140 more Brazilian landscapes for the next 36 years, working from sketches and memory. His compositions standardized a marketable vision of the New World: placid, open landscapes with orderly plantations, docile indigenous figures, and fantastical but plausible fauna. The Rijksmuseum holds 17 of his works, the Louvre six. Post's paintings served not as strict documentation but as persuasive propaganda for the West India Company's colonial project, merging observation with invention to make the foreign seem manageable and ripe for exploitation.