POST, Frans
(b. 1612, Haarlem, d. 1680, Haarlem)

Brazilian Landscape

1650
Oil on wood, 61 x 91 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Frans Post was the first trained European artist to depict the landscape of South America. As a young man he traveled to the north-east of Brazil with Johan Maurits, Count of Nassau-Siegen, who was Governor General of the Dutch colony there. A very few paintings that he made there have come down to us, but the drawings that he must have made there (though very few survive), and above all his own recollections of the seven years he spent there, served as the basis for his entire output over the remaining 35 years of his life.