Albert Eckhout (Groningen Holanda ca.1610 - idem ca.1666)
Albert Eckhout was a painter and draftsman. He began his painting studies with his uncle, Gheert Roeleffs. In the service of Count Maurice of Nassau, governor-general of Dutch Brazil, he traveled to Brazil, where he stayed for seven years, between 1637 and 1644. Among his traveling companions in Nassau's entourage were the artists Frans Post and Georg Marcgraf. During his time in northeastern Brazil, he worked intensively documenting the fauna and flora, as well as painting human types. This phase is considered the most important of his career.
During his stay in Brazil, Albert Eckhout produced about 400 drawings and oil sketches, which Nassau gave to Frederich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg, in 1652, and which were later gathered by Christian Mentzel between 1660 and 1664 into the volumes Theatri Rerum Naturalium Brasiliae and Miscellanea Cleyeri, now held by the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Kraków, Poland. He also produced 26 oil paintings that were given to King Frederik III of Denmark in 1654, 24 of which are now preserved in the Ethnographic Department of the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen.
In May 1644, Eckhout returned to the Netherlands and settled in Groningen. He later married and moved to Amersfoort, east of Amsterdam, where his two children were born. In 1653, he began working as a painter at the court of Johann Georg II in Dresden. In 1663, he went back to live in Groningen, where he died around the end of 1665 or the beginning of 1666. At the end of the 18th century, a series of his cartoons was turned into tapestries by the Gobelins Manufactory.
Critical Commentary
Little is known about the life of the Dutch painter Albert Eckhout before his arrival in Pernambuco in 1637. He was probably introduced to the arts by his uncle Gheert Roeleffs, but there is no record of any work by him made before his stay in Brazil. He may have been recommended to Count Maurice of Nassau (1604 - 1679) by the painter and architect Jacob van Campen (1595 - 1657) to join the group of artists and scientists responsible for documenting the New World during the Dutch government's stay in Pernambuco, between 1637 and 1644. Besides Eckhout, whose task was to portray Brazil's fauna, flora and human types, the group included the painter Frans Post (1612 - 1680), the physician Willem Piso (1611 - 1678) and the naturalist Georg Marcgraf (1610 - 1644).
In Brazil, the artist produces a group of about 400 drawings and oil sketches based on direct observation of living specimens found on his excursions through Brazilian territory or in the botanical garden created by Nassau. Donated by Nassau to Frederich Wilhelm in 1652, the studies were gathered by Christian Mentzel in 1660-1664 into the volumes Theatri Rerum Naturalium Brasiliae and Miscellanea Cleyeri, now held by the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Kraków, Poland. These quickly executed works, which nonetheless seek to capture both the general characteristics and the specific details of the motifs observed, served as the basis for his large oil paintings, later made in the studio, and for the tapestries of the Old and New Indies series, made by the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris, France.
Albert Eckhout became known mainly for the group of 21 oil paintings on Brazilian themes. This group consists of the four pairs of ethnographic portraits of the inhabitants of 17th-century Brazil - Homem Tapuia (Tapuya Man), 1643, and Mulher Tapuia (Tapuya Woman), 1641; Homem Tupi (Tupi Man), 1643, and Mulher Tupi (Tupi Woman), 1641; Homem Mulato (Mulatto Man), n.d., and Mulher Mameluca (Mameluca Woman), 1641; and Homem Negro (Black Man) and Mulher Negra (Black Woman), both from 1641 - a series of 12 still lifes with tropical fruits and vegetables or those grown on Brazilian soil (all undated) and the large panel Dança dos Tapuias (Tapuya Dance), n.d. Through Nassau's donation to King Frederik III of Denmark in 1654, the works now belong to the Nationalmuseet [National Museum of Denmark] in Copenhagen.
While for a long time these works were seen as faithful portraits of Brazilian reality, valued for their documentary quality, it is now known that an intricate relationship between ideal and reality gave rise to these paintings. First, it should be noted that the composition of the four ethnographic pairs follows a pattern found in illustrations in travelers' books: the figure is placed in the center of the foreground, life-size and in a frontal position. Their poses recall European portraits of the time. In the background, the horizon line sits well below the midline. Characteristic elements of each ethnic group's habitat appear throughout the painting and serve its symbolic construction. For example, the adornments of the Black Woman (a hat decorated with peacock feathers, earrings and a choker with a pearl pendant, a red coral necklace, a gold or brass bracelet and a beaded bracelet) alert us to the idealized and rhetorical character of the figure depicted. The basket in her right hand comes from Angola or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, associating the woman with the place of origin of most of the black slaves held by the Dutch in Brazil. Perhaps that is why this woman bears so little resemblance to the real image of a slave woman of the time. Likewise, the guinea pigs at the feet of the Mameluca Woman and the wild dog between the legs of the Tapuya Woman should be understood as outward signs of each character's degree of civility. In this sense, it should always be borne in mind that these portraits somehow capture the perspective of Dutch domination in Brazil more than Brazil itself, as Ana Maria de Moraes Belluzzo has observed.2
Another factor to consider is the decorative function of these paintings. Their exact destination is not known for certain, whether they were meant to hang in the main hall of the Palácio Friburgo or to decorate an "exotic" room in a European palace. Nor is it certain that these paintings were made in Brazil. However, bearing this decorative quality in mind helps to understand the somewhat unusual scale of the group. The series of still lifes, measuring between 85 x 85 cm and 93 x 93 cm, impresses with its richness of color and detail and, naturally, with the size of the fruits and vegetables. The arrangement of the fruits on a table or ledge, in the foreground very close to the viewer and in contrast with the grayish background of the sky, heightens the exotic character of the group.
On the other hand, this composition re-establishes Albert Eckhout's ties with the most "specialized"3 branch of 17th-century Dutch genre painting: still life. The way he exposes the inside of fruits and vegetables, the documentary effort to render the texture of their surfaces, often resorting to powerful contrasts of light and shadow, and the simultaneity of several points of view of the same subject, dissecting it into parts - for example, the cassava roots in the painting Mandioca (Cassava), n.d. - reveal the microscopic vision (on an enlarged scale) characteristic of northern painters. As Svetlana Alpers observes, these artists saw it as one of their tasks to offer a new and concrete knowledge of the world through the direct insertion of the eye into reality.4
Notes
1 Said of a prince or bishop who took part in the election of the emperor in old Germany.
2 BELLUZZO, Ana Maria de Moraes. O Brasil dos viajantes: imaginário do novo mundo. São Paulo: Metalivros, 1994. v. 1.
3 GOMBRICH, E.H. A história da arte. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Guanabara, 1988. p. 338.
4 ALPERS, Svetlana. A arte de descrever: a arte holandesa no século XVII. São Paulo: Edusp, 1999.
Critiques
"Eckhout was not a great painter. There are paintings, or parts of paintings, that reveal great virtuosity, and he had an extremely honest and penetrating eye when it came to seeing what was in front of him, but the paintings are memorable essentially for one thing: their exotic subjects. He stands out among the ordinary artists of his time because he chose, or was obliged to choose, a highly unusual field, and because he did so competently. While his contemporaries carefully explored flower arrangements, half-peeled lemons and pewter jugs, apparently placed in some darkened room, Eckhout was busy with spiders the size of his hand, boa constrictors and coconuts in broad daylight".
Peter James Palmer Whitehead and Martin Boeseman
WHITEHEAD, Peter James Palmer; BOESEMAN, Martin. Albert Eckhout. In:_______;_______. Um retrato do Brasil holandês do século XVII: animais, plantas e gente, pelos artistas de Johan Maurits de Nassau. Rio de Janeiro: Kosmos, 1989. p. 178.
"Information about the life and work of Albert Eckhout is much sparser than that about Frans Post, and the work the artist may have produced before and after his stay in Brazil remains a mystery. No pre-Brazilian painting by Eckhout is known, and the authorship of those that may be attributed to him after his return from Brazil is debated. Charged by Maurice of Nassau with recording the fauna, flora and human types (while Frans Post was entrusted with landscapes and battle scenes), Eckhout must have arrived in Brazil at the same time as Nassau and Post, in 1637. In addition to numerous studies of plants and animals, as well as still lifes with tropical fruits, during his stay in the Northeast Eckhout made a series of eight large paintings (c. 265 x 165 cm), which fortunately are still preserved together in the National Museum of Denmark and form one of the most valuable groups of images on New World themes. It is hard to overstate the importance of these paintings, in which the three races Eckhout observed in Brazil are represented: the black, the Indian and the mixed-race, with the refinement of distinguishing the Tapuya from the Tupinambá and the mameluca from the mestizo. These paintings delighted both Humboldt and Pedro II when they discovered them in Copenhagen in the 19th century. The latter commissioned copies of six of them, which are now at the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro".
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
LAGO, Pedro Corrêa do Lago. Albert Eckhout. In: MOSTRA DO REDESCOBRIMENTO, 2000, SÃO PAULO. O olhar distante. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo: Associação Brasil 500 anos Artes Visuais, 2000. p. 110.
"In terms of context and technique, the paintings can be divided into two series: the portraits and the still lifes. What they have in common is the exotic nature of their content, confirming European conventions and myths. The paintings were probably commissioned by Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen for the apotheosis of the wonders in which he took part and of the grandeur he created. With this aspect in mind, the function, purpose and place for which they were conceived can be analyzed and deduced. The number of paintings, their subjects and their composition clearly suggest that they were conceived as decoration (...) The subject of the paintings is the exotic and, ..., the exotic is never at home. We might add that exaggerations and myths should never be confronted with reality. Consequently, the room or rooms with such a decoration could hardly be imagined outside a European setting. The black slave with his majestic sword, the mestizo's precious weapon and, above all, the cannibal Tapuya woman holding the remains of a human body are in such perfect harmony with the preconceived vision and scheme of the non-European world that they would prove false if subjected to close examination. (...) The botanical, zoological and, above all, ethnographic content of the paintings is less realistic than is usually supposed. This does not diminish their importance or their artistic value. There is a complexity of meanings: the transcriptions and exaggerations emphasize the ideological function. The paintings are imposing in their dimensions and subjects. They were conceived to impress the 17th-century viewer, but this effect has stood the test of time. Their documentary value is debatable only if considered from the standpoint of 21st-century ethnographic documentation".
Barbara Berlowicz
BERLOWICZ, Barbara. Pinturas de Alberto Eckhout - Interpretação de Conteúdo e Técnica. In: VRIES, Elly de (org.), DOURADO, Guilherme Mazza (org.). Albert Eckhout volta ao Brasil: 1644-2002. Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 2002. p. 206-207.
"In Eckhout, nearness and distance are contemplated in a systematic unity. Both are necessary for descriptive and recording sharpness. More than backdrops for typological enumeration and qualification, the distances are as important as the foregrounds. This kind of consistency (difficult to achieve, since it rejects the easy workshop devices of the blurring of aerial perspective) has been taken as a defect of the painter. On the contrary, I see in it merit and a great undertaking on the artist's part. The obsessive imposition of detail (clarity and focus) from the first to the last plane, from earth to sky, is consistent with the mystical and allegorical bareness of the scene. This materialist, hard and precise painting is therefore realistic without being illusional or elusive, while still being acceptable even to Catholics... who can see in it, besides truths, reverence for life. What we are speaking of, in a mirror, is, however, more pragmatics than pantheism, and, naturally, the modeling of the world-landscape by pieces of knowledge. The specular plane on which facts and things reverberate in Eckhout's paintings is a syntactic setting, a circuit of earthly and terrestrial relations: the systematic enumeration of the thing to be seen. And to be seen again. Unlike an accessory in a genre scene that points to a symbolic flight - (common in Rubens and the Italianizing painters, for example) - every, I mean every single, detail of an Eckhout painting is persistent and durable; it does not evaporate in relation to metaphor. In this sense, the painter singles out and circumscribes singularity within the field of enumeration, a field that, unlike that of meta-imaginary painting, is by requirement finite. Such finitude, coagulated in objects, beings, peoples and things (enumerated, qualified), fixed in a recurrent and compulsive gnosis, is a Territory and, I am immediately tempted to say, the territory of Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen. So be it: Eckhout creates (in the full breadth of the etymon) a metaphor of the Conquest, insofar as he captures and treasures the domains surveyed by Nassau".
João Câmara
CÂMARA, João. Albert Eckhout ou A Conquista Óptica. In: VRIES, Elly de (org.), DOURADO, Guilherme Mazza (org.). Albert Eckhout volta ao Brasil: 1644-2002. Copenhagen: National Museum of Denmark, 2002. p. 220-221.
Collections
Nationalmuseet - Copenhagen (Denmark)
Statens Museum for Kunst - Copenhagen (Denmark)
Posthumous Exhibitions
1953 - The Hague (Netherlands) - Maurits de Braziliaan, at Mauritshuis
1968 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The Painters of Maurice of Nassau, at MAM/RJ
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: A Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, at Fundação Bienal
1987 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Images of Dutch Brazil 1630-1654, at Paço Imperial
1991 - São Paulo SP - The Forest, at MAC/USP
1991 - São Paulo SP - Albert Eckhout and His Time: Dutch Brazil 1637-1644, at Masp
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Nature: Four Centuries of Art in Brazil, at CCBB
1992 - Zurich (Switzerland) - Brasilien: entdeckung und selbstentdeckung, at Kunsthaus Zürich
1994 - São Paulo SP - Brazil through Travelers' Eyes, at Masp
1995 - Lisbon (Portugal) - Brazil through Travelers' Eyes, at Centro Cultural de Belém
1996 - London (England) - Brazil: through european eyes, at Embaixada Brasileira
1998 - São Paulo SP - 24th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Fundação Bienal
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brasil + 500 Mostra do Redescobrimento. The Distant Gaze, at Fundação Bienal
2002 - Brasília DF - Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil: 1644-2002, at Conjunto Cultural da Caixa
2002 - Recife PE - Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil: 1644-2002, at Instituto Ricardo Brennand
2003 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil: 1644-2003, at Paço Imperial
2002 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Portraits of the New World: The Legacy of Albert Eckhout, at Conjunto Cultural da Caixa
2003 - São Paulo SP - Albert Eckhout Returns to Brazil: 1644-2003, at Pinacoteca do Estado
2010 - São Paulo SP - Brasiliana Itaú Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
2010 - Belo Horizonte MG - Brasiliana Itaú Collection, at Fundação Clóvis Salgado. Palácio das Artes
2011 - Brasília DF - Brasiliana Itaú Collection, at Museu Nacional do Conjunto Cultural da República
2011 - Fortaleza CE - Brasiliana Itaú Collection, at Espaço Cultural Unifor
Source: Itaú Cultural
