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. Although this figure is nude and baring her breasts like many of the other women in this series, Eckhout desexualizes her body by depicting her as a cannibal, holding a severed hand with more body parts on the basket slung on her back. Depicting native Americans as cannibals was a common trope in European art reaching back to the early sixteenth century at the beginning of the colonial period. Eckhout emphasizes her savagery and, in doing so, elevates the supposedly civilized European viewers.
Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Eckhout_Tapuia_woman_1641.jpg
QUILOMBO DOS PALMARES AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY BRAZIL 
