Frans Post (Haarlem, Holanda 1612 - idem 1680)
Painter, draftsman and printmaker.
Frans Janszoon Post began painting in Haarlem, in the Netherlands, where he possibly studied with his brother, the architect Pieter Jansz Post (1608 - 1669). He frequented the studios of Pieter Molijn (1595 - 1661), Salomon van Ruysdael (ca. 1602 - 1670) and Salomon de Bray (1597 - 1664). Recommended by his brother to Count Maurice of Nassau, governor-general of Dutch Brazil, he joined the retinue that came to the country in 1637. Among his companions were the artists Albert Eckhout (ca. 1610 - ca. 1666) and Georg Marcgraf (1610 - 1644). As landscape painter, Frans Post was in charge of documenting the topography, military and civil architecture, and scenes of naval and land battles. The oil paintings made in Brazil make no concession to exoticism; his landscape is serene and subordinate to reality. In 1644 he returned to the Netherlands and continued painting Brazilian subjects, producing about a hundred oil paintings based on his sketches and drawings, to which he began adding exotic elements of tropical fauna and flora. In 1646 he joined the Guild of Saint Luke (Lukasgilde), an obligation for every painter not in the service of the court, of which he became director ten years later and, later still, treasurer. With a selection of the many drawings he had made of Brazil, he illustrated the book Rerum per Octennium in Brasilia by Caspar Barlaeus (Gaspar Barléu) (1584 - 1648), published in 1647, which recounts the deeds of Maurice of Nassau during his eight years of government in Brazil.
Critical Commentary
Little is known of the Dutch landscape painter Frans Post's work before his arrival in Pernambuco in 1637, as a member of the retinue of artists and scientists brought by Count Maurice of Nassau to document the New World during his government in Brazil. The son of the stained-glass painter Jan Janszoon Post (15-- - 1614) and brother of the architect and painter Pieter Jansz Post (1608 - 1669), Post turned early to one of the most important genres of Dutch painting at the time, landscape painting. It is not known for certain how he was trained. He may have frequented the studios of prestigious landscape painters such as Salomon van Ruysdael (ca. 1602 - 1670) or Pieter Molijn. In any case, his relationship with Dutch painting of the first half of the 17th century is evident throughout his artistic production.
When he landed on the Brazilian coast as the official painter responsible for depicting in drawings and canvases the landscape, the military deeds and the architecture of Dutch Brazil, Post was merely a young promising talent. Recommended to Nassau by his brother, it was through contact with Brazilian reality that he developed an original body of work. Even after returning to Europe he continued to paint tropical views, specializing in Brazilian subjects. He is believed to have painted 18 pictures during his almost eight-year stay in the country, but only seven of them can be seen today. In canvases such as Vista da Ilha de Itamaracá [View of the Island of Itamaracá], 1637, Vista dos Arredores de Porto Calvo [View of the Surroundings of Porto Calvo], 1639, or Forte Hendrik [Fort Hendrik], 1640, some features that mark Post's production can clearly be seen: low horizon lines with high skies in open planes over a vast area, set against vegetation or foreground motifs in simplified but meticulous drawing. These canvases show a certain homogeneous coloring of subdued tones, closer to Dutch painting than to the colors of the local landscape. Such low-perspective compositions were common to a type of panoramic painting developed by the Dutch at the time. To them, Post added the landscape of the New World. From this combination came informative and serene paintings, restrained in the face of tropical exuberance. In this sense, Post is "the first artist on American soil to have given a faithful and at the same time poetic vision of the region, avoiding fantasies and implausibilities", as the historian José Roberto Teixeira Leite observes.
Back in Europe, his drawings served as the basis for the plates published in Caspar Barlaeus's (Gaspar Barléu, 1584 - 1648) volume Rerum per Octennium in Brasilia. He left the service of Count Maurice of Nassau but went on painting tropical landscapes, for which he found a market. This production, made far from the motif on the basis of studies done in America, took various paths. Until about 1659 the artist continued his constructions of topographical landscapes of documentary precision. However, the scenes made in Europe often show a certain "break" in the serenity of the landscape through the placing of animals or wild scenes - lizards, serpents, armadillos, snakes devouring rabbits, for example - in the foreground of the picture. At this point, too, the diffuse light of his Brazilian works is replaced by the contrast of stronger colors.
From 1660 to 1669, Post's mature phase, there is a growing mastery of technique and of Brazilian subjects, but at the expense of spontaneity. There is no longer any documentary concern. The artist composes by rearranging plant, animal, topographical and architectural elements, displaying perfect command of his pictorial vocabulary. These are ideal landscapes, often rich in picturesque details. In this period he is at the height of his powers as a miniaturist. The handling becomes more impasted and the background is structured in greens and blues (in the tradition of Flemish painting). A certain diaphanous luminosity pervades the last works. However, in this phase of commercial success he did not venture into new compositions, always returning to the same subjects (for example, views of Olinda, sugar mills, landscapes with scattered houses and figures). In his last years Frans Post lived in obscurity, given over to drink and unable to create. Perhaps the measure of his artistic success as the most important painter of the Brazilian landscape in the 17th century can be gauged by the tribute paid him by his friend Frans Hals (ca. 1581 - 1666), who painted his portrait around 1655.
Critiques
"It is undeniable that with his Brazilian landscapes Frans Post conquered a domain of his own, creating a genre in which he would have no competitors. Typical, personal, though somewhat cold, his work is related to that of other Dutch landscape painters of his time, such as Philips Koninck, but benefits from the novelty of the tropical subject. Historically his importance is also great, as he was the first painter to give, on American soil, a version of the region at once faithful and poetic, at a time when all emphasis was placed on religious painting".
José Roberto Teixeira Leite
LEITE, José Roberto Teixeira. Dicionário crítico da pintura no Brasil. Rio de Janeiro: Artlivre, 1988. p. 420.
"Post's art exerted a cultural influence on his compatriots that aroused their curiosity and eagerness to know more about this famous overseas country, of which he was the interpreter, the witness, the pictorial reporter. That is what is credited in his favor. Post earned his naturalization through his work. If his art did not influence the native painters, he is nonetheless their ancestor: the first true landscape painter to work under their sun. That is why he may be called 'The Interpreter of Brazil'. (...) The artist's work comprises more than a hundred canvases and numerous drawings and prints, all on Brazilian motifs (...)".
Erik Larsen
AYALA, Walmir. Dicionário de pintores brasileiros. Rio de Janeiro: Spala, 1992. 2 v.
"The flatness of the Dutch land allowed the observer on the ground to perceive its extent and the conspicuous presence of the sky, and led the artist to confront a 'moving world' made of space, air and light, clouds and wind, as Germain Bazin recognized. For that author, the Dutch created the landscape 'where the sky is everything' (...). It is striking that the constructive content of the pictures rests on a new discovery by Post, who began to position buildings along imaginary diagonals traced across the territory, so that their facades received directly the light he cast into the picture, entering preferably along the left diagonal, standing out from the other, shadowed sides of the building. Post made it common practice in his work to darken the foreground and illuminate the most distant area, from which he made a diffuse atmospheric luminosity radiate. He also knew how to project a band of light over a given area of the picture, so as to cut across the landscape and, by illuminating it, make the facades brighter. He mastered various lighting devices, which he used simultaneously. Among them is the effect obtained from the contrast between the brightness of white clothing and the darkness of the Black figures, whom he always kept on the move, carrying their ever-present white loads on their heads".
Ana Maria de Moraes Belluzzo
BELLUZZO, Ana Maria de Moraes. O Brasil dos viajantes. São Paulo: Metalivros; Salvador: Fundação Emílio Odebrecht, 1994. v. 1: imaginário do novo mundo.
"(...) Post painted as a Dutch painter, with his abundant Haarlem-style eye, looking 'descriptively' only at the visible, stripping painting of every emblematic or rhetorical contribution; that is, he painted as a Dutchman in Brazil, against a centuries-old and powerful Italianizing tradition. Consequently, these first landscapes are (already) no longer so: they are imbued with the enveloping gaze of a Dutch painter who condenses in them the conventions of a school, with his 'European' way of painting, before the still nameless and certainly shapeless nature of the American continent. Finally, to crown the adventure with its reverse, on returning to the Netherlands Post did nothing but paint, like a painter from another world, in the serene uniformity of the distant United Provinces, 'Brazilian landscapes', memories of the tropics that would grant him an unquestionable form of 'distinction', 'landscape caprices' made untimely and belatedly, like a long and languid 'giving back' of the landscapes he had digested in his youth on crossing the ocean sea.
Every foundation acts according to a 'double temporality'. Every foundation unfolds and produces its effects in two different times, complementary, interchangeable, mutually annihilating. Thus Post, founder of the 'American landscape', came to Brazil - in a first moment of the foundation - and later, back in the Netherlands, throughout a durable and prolonged pictorial production, became aware - in a second moment of the foundation, in each picture and in the sum of all the pictures - of a landscape he had already lost and therefore needed to restore (or replace). Then came the 'caprices', the 'landscape fantasies' that have made him known to this day for a double obsession: a landscape obsession and a tropical obsession".
Luis Pérez Oramas
ORAMAS, Luis Pérez. Paisagem e fundação: Frans Post e a invenção da paisagem americana. In: BIENAL INTERNACIONAL DE SÃO PAULO, 24., 1998, São Paulo, SP. Núcleo histórico: antropofagia e histórias de canibalismos. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1998. 570 p., il. color. p. 103-104.
"Although Post's prints derive from the drawings made in America, it is essential to understand them within the political agenda of Barlaeus's work, for which they were engraved by the artist or by others. These prints differ from the paintings made at the same time, since their function is to accompany the text they illustrate. They owe support to Barlaeus's encomiastic purpose. They must publicize Nassau's military, political, economic and urban achievements and indicate the difficulties and economic potential of the West India Company. They show the challenges of a hostile and wild environment to be dominated and conquered in order to produce wealth, justifying Nassau's frustrated demands for investment and military support during his Brazilian period. They are therefore prints that convey strangeness but, in the rationality of their political aims, make no concession to exoticism. On the contrary, they can be coherently related to the codes of 17th-century Dutch printmaking and its models for symbolizing the relationship with the productive landscape, whether countryside or city. Nevertheless, they may present not only similarities but above all necessary or contingent differences in relation to the physical and human landscape of Europe and its iconological and artistic paradigms".
Paulo Herkenhoff
HERKENHOFF, Paulo. Representação do Negro nas Índias Ocidentais: Barléu, Post e Eckhout. In: ______ (org.). O Brasil e os holandeses: 1630-1654. Rio de Janeiro: Sextante Artes, 1999. 271 p., il. color. p. 136.
"Frans Post is not only the first painter of the Brazilian landscape but also the first landscape painter of the Americas. He holds a position of fundamental importance for Brazilian art (...) Indeed, it is not hard to imagine the surprise and fascination of a young 25-year-old painter, trained in the Haarlem school and used to the low skies and flat topography of the Netherlands, before the exuberant nature, the new light, flora, fauna and peoples he discovered on landing in Pernambuco. Vista de Itamaracá [View of Itamaracá], painted by Post a few months after his arrival in 1637 (...), is the first Brazilian landscape, and also the first oil painting on a secular subject executed by a professional artist in the Americas. It took a combination of highly improbable circumstances for Post to come to Brazil and become the first Old World painter to portray the landscape of the New World. The main historical chance was perhaps the very personality of Prince Maurice of Nassau, who, besides being the military leader the Netherlands needed to command the Brazilian provinces, was also a cultivated and vain man who wished to take talented scientists and artists in his retinue to record the unknown that awaited him, which he already guessed would be of great interest to the European nobles he would meet again on his return to the Netherlands. Post's production known to date consists exclusively of pictures on Brazilian subjects. In museums and private collections in various parts of the world, just over 160 oil paintings of very uneven quality have been identified".
Pedro Corrêa do Lago
MOSTRA DO REDESCOBRIMENTO, 2000. O Olhar distante. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo: Associação Brasil 500 anos Artes Visuais, 2000, p. 76.
Collections
Alte Pinakothek - Munich (Germany)
Fundação Maria Luisa e Oscar Americano - São Paulo SP
Historisches Museum - Frankfurt (Germany)
Instituto Ricardo Brennand - Engenho São João da Várzea - Recife PE
J. Paul Getty Museum - Los Angeles (United States)
Landesmuseum - Mainz (Germany)
Musée du Louvre - Paris (France)
Museu de Arte de São Paulo - Masp - São Paulo SP
Museu do Estado de Pernambuco - Recife PE
Museu Nacional de Belas Artes - MNBA - Rio de Janeiro RJ
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen - Rotterdam (Netherlands)
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam - Amsterdam (Netherlands)
The Detroit Institute of Arts - Michigan (United States)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Met - New York (United States)
Posthumous Exhibitions
1942 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Frans Post: Retrospective, at MNBA
1953 - São Paulo SP - 2nd Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Pavilhão dos Estados
1968 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The Painters of Maurício de Nassau, at MAM/RJ
1973 - São Paulo SP - Frans Post 1612-1680: Works from São Paulo Collections, at Masp
1980 - São Paulo SP - The Brazilian Landscape: 1650-1976, at Paço das Artes
1983 - Recife PE - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves], at Fundação Joaquim Nabuco
1984 - Aracaju SE - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves]
1984 - Brasília DF - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves]
1984 - Lisbon (Portugal) - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves], at Museu Gulbenkian da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
1984 - Salvador BA - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves]
1984 - Vitória ES - 50 Years of Casa-Grande & Senzala [The Masters and the Slaves]
1985 - São Paulo SP - 100 Itaú Works, at Masp
1987 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Images of Dutch Brazil 1630-1654, at Paço Imperial
1987 - São Paulo SP - Brazil Painted by National and Foreign Masters: 18th - 20th Centuries, at Masp
1990 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Portraits of Paradise, at CCBB
1991 - São Paulo SP - The Forest, at MAC/USP
1992 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Nature: Four Centuries of Art in Brazil, at CCBB
1992 - São Paulo SP - Sérgio's View of Brazilian Art: Drawings and Paintings, at Biblioteca Municipal Mário de Andrade
1992 - Zurich (Switzerland) - Brasilien: Entdeckung und Selbstentdeckung, at Kunsthaus Zürich
1993 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazilian Landscapes by Foreign Artists, at Galeria de Arte Sesc Tijuca
1994 - Poços de Caldas MG - Unibanco Collection: Exhibition Celebrating Unibanco's 70th Anniversary, at Casa de Cultura
1994 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Iconography of the Landscape
1994 - São Paulo SP - Brazil of the Travelers, at Masp
1995 - Lisbon (Portugal) - Brazil of the Travelers, at Centro Cultural de Belém
1995 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Unibanco Collection: Exhibition Celebrating Unibanco's 70th Anniversary, at MAM/RJ
1996 - London (England) - Brazil Through European Eyes, at Christie's
1998 - Brasília DF - Brazilian Like Me, Like Whom?, at Ministério das Relações Exteriores
1998 - São Paulo SP - 24th Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, at Fundação Bienal
1998 - São Paulo SP - Highlights of the Unibanco Collection, at Instituto Moreira Salles
1999 - Paris (France) - Brésil Baroque: entre ciel et terre, at Musée des Beaux-Arts
1999 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil and the Dutch, at MNBA
1999 - São Paulo SP - Brazilian Like Me, Like Whom?, at MAB/Faap. Salão Cultural
1999 - São Paulo SP - Brazil and the Dutch, at Banco Real
2000 - Porto Alegre RS - From Frans Post to Eliseu Visconti: Museu Nacional de Belas Artes - RJ Collection, at Margs
2000 - Recife PE - Brazil and the Dutch, at Espaço Cultural Bandepe
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brasil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition, at Fundação Bienal
2001 - New York (United States) - Brazil: Body and Soul, at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
2002 - São Paulo SP - Image and Identity: A Look at History in the Museu de Belas Artes Collection, at Instituto Cultural Banco Santos
2003 - Recife PE - Frans Post and Dutch Brazil, at Instituto Ricardo Brennand
2004 - São Paulo SP - Paper Cabinet, at CCSP
2004 - São Paulo SP - Village of Ipojuca, at CCSP
Source: Itaú Cultural
