Audio Stop 958

NARRATOR:
Frans Post, an artist of the so-called Dutch Golden Age, was the first European to paint landscapes in the Americas. His idyllic depictions of Dutch Brazil were intended for a European audience and read almost like travel posters celebrating the wealth and abundance of the colonial lands.

The way Post portrays the people in his painting draws the attention of exhibition advisory board member and Howard University professor of history Ana Lucia Araujo.

ANA LUCIA ARAUJO:
The way the Black body is represented in this painting is very similar to other representations that we see during the period, they are represented as a sort of detail in this painting.  They are not intended to be the most prominent element.

They are represented as being part of the nature that is related to this idea of exoticism, that people of color, indigenous people, and Africans and the animals and the fauna and the flora, they are part of the same setting, whereas Europeans, they are something different.

It is significant because it reflects this view that Europeans were building at the time about Africans and indigenous populations as this other. They are something else. And this is why we can enslave them, this is why the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Europeans, they could justify the enslavement of these populations, because they were not part of their same group, of their same ‘civilization,’ within quotation marks.  

The painting raises a number of questions that contemporary artists are now working about; that is the idea of race, who is seen, what is hidden, what is visible, and what is not.