View of Itamaracá Island in Brazil

Frans Post was one of the artists who travelled to Brazil with Johan Maurits. This landscape with a view of Itamaracá Island is the first painting that we know of by Post. And the first that a European painter made of Brazil.

Standing by the water are four men: two Portuguese and two enslaved Africans. Their presence makes the painting more than just a simple Brazilian landscape – Post inadvertently shows us that the inequality between black and white was linked to skin colour.