Albert Eckhout arrived in Brazil as a court painter for the Dutch governor Johann Maurits van Nassau-Siegen. During his time there, he painted a variety of images intended as a type of “documentation” of the people, land, and wildlife of Brazil. This painting is one of eight ethnographic images he produced along these lines. The woman’s bare breasts and shameless gaze, the sexual implications of the boy’s gesture, and the connotations of the overflowing tropical fruit allude to the stereotypes that were associated with African women in the colonial period. The objects in the image contain a mix of African, Brazilian, and European goods and visually communicate the diversity of the Dutch Brazilian populace as well as the dominance of the colonial European gaze.
Literature: Brienen, Rebecca Parker. Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.
Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mulher_Africana.jpg
QUILOMBO DOS PALMARES AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BRAZIL 
