Albert Eckhout (c.1610–1665) was a Dutch portrait and still life painter. Eckhout, the son of Albert Eckhourt and Marryen Roeleffs, was born in Groningen, but his training as an artist and early career are unknown. A majority of the works attributed to him are unsigned. He was among the first European artists to paint scenes from the New World. He was in the entourage of the Dutch governor-general of Brazil, Johan Maurits, Prince of Nassau-Siegen, who took him and fellow painter Frans Post to Dutch Brazil to have them record the country's landscape, inhabitants, flora and fauna. Eckhout is also famous for his still-life paintings of Brazilian fruits and vegetables. His paintings were intended for decoration in a domestic context.
Work
Eckhout focused on the people, plants and animals of the region when arriving in Dutch Brazil. He painted eight life-size ethnographic representations of Brazil's inhabitants, twelve still lifes, and a large piece of dancing indigenous people. These ethnographic works, done between 1641 and 1643 for Maurits, were subsequently gifted to Maurits's cousin, King Frederick III of Denmark, and they remain in Copenhagen to this day. His work is said to be the first realistic images of the Tupi and Tapuya tribes of the native population of Brazil. Alexander von Humboldt saw the paintings in 1827, as did Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II in 1876, both of whom praised the works enthusiastically.
Tapuyas
When painting the Tapuya, his goal was to be as accurate as possible by including various plants in the background, as well as indigenous animals and reptiles in the foreground. One of his ethnographic works is a calmly composed Tupuyan woman, who holds a human hand and has a human leg in her basket, which reflects the European stereotype that indigenous Americans practiced cannibalism. Eckhout's image of the Tapuya woman echoes another of his paintings, The Tapuya Dance, representing a dance performed by eight Tapuya Indians with their characteristic mushroom hair style, spear-throwers (atlatls) and war-clubs, depicting a spectacular a war dance ceremony. These pictures were accordance with the stereotypical mental image Europeans had of indigenous Brazilians.
Africans
Eckhout's paintings of the African man and women speak a multi-layered language of trade, gift giving, and political alliance to their contemporary audiences, Maurits and his court. These paintings are related to the area of Africa where the Dutch had conquered the greatest number of commercial contacts during the seventeenth century, Guinea and Angola. During this time, Dutch West India Company troops had established forts in these two areas of the West African Coast because the Dutch needed a reliable source of black Africans for enslaved labor on their Brazilian sugar plantations.
His painting of the black woman has the figure standing against the coast with palms, and a papaya tree. Amerindians are depicted fishing along the shoreline, and ships are on the horizon. In the image, the woman wears a hat with peacock feathers and a small white clay pipe that is tucked into the sash at her waist. The nude boy on her side is most likely her son, though the child's skin tone is several shades lighter than the woman's skin color. The white pearl double ropes and red coral beads that curve around her neck expose her breasts. This image's emphasis on sexuality, fecundity, and prosperity is reinforced by her cornucopia-like basket, which overflows with tropical fruit. When looking at Eckhout's image of the black man, the man's strength and virility are highlighted by his muscular appearance and the phallic form of the palm tree at his left. The man holds a ceremonial sword that is decorated with a large pink shell. At the bottom of his feet are shells laid out with an elephant's tusk on the ground, curving out of the picture plane to the right. This man's only piece of clothing, similar to the image of the African woman, is a piece of a blue and white striped cloth wrapped around his waist.
Mulattos/Mulacken
By the sixteenth century, the term mulatto, also referred as mulacken, was used in Portugal, Spain, and their colonial possessions to classify various people, often slaves and those of mixed racial background, on the basis of the color of their skin.