8/12/2018 Fantastic beasts: Frans Post’s lost animal drawings from Brazil | Financial Times

FT Magazine Life & Arts

Fantastic beasts: Frans Post’s lost animal drawings from
Brazil

The Dutch artist’s rediscovered works are going on show in Dublin

Clive Cookson AUGUST 10, 2018

In the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) hangs a remarkable oil

painting by the Dutch golden-age artist Frans Post (1612-1680),
one of the first Europeans employed to illustrate the New World
for people back home. The background shows a Brazilian
landscape and a sugar mill. The foreground is populated with a
menagerie of nine exotic animals including a crab-eating raccoon,
two armadillo species, caimans, tapirs and monkeys.

From next month, visitors to the Dublin gallery will be able to see
Post’s canvas — painted in his Haarlem studio in the 1660s —
alongside 34 original drawings of wildlife he made from 1637 to

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1644 while living in the short-lived colony of Dutch Brazil or New

Holland.

These unsigned works had lain forgotten in Haarlem’s Noord-

Hollands archive until senior curator Alexander de Bruin
discovered them in 2013 while carrying out an inventory of its
16th- and 17th-century drawings. He spotted their fine quality
and resemblance to animals in Post paintings; the attribution was
verified by experts at Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and published
in 2016. How and when they came into the archive is not yet
known.

Neon Flying Squid with its Tentacles © Courtesy Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem

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Brazilian Porcupine © Courtesy Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem

Alpaca or Llama © Courtesy Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem

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White-Eared Opossum © Courtesy Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem

Brazilian Landscape, 1660s © National Gallery of Ireland

“This cache of animal drawings provides the missing link between

Post’s seven-year Brazilian adventure and the paintings replete
with exotic creatures that he produced on his return to Haarlem,”
says Niamh MacNally, curator of the Dublin exhibition.

Art historians had suspected that Post must have brought home a
cache of drawings and used them to populate his later oil
paintings of Brazil, which sold well to a Dutch public fascinated

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by exotic images of the Americas. Several are displayed today in

prominent European museums, including a superb view of the
town of Olinda from the Rijksmuseum that will be in the Dublin
show. Although they usually feature Brazilian animals, none has
as much wildlife as the NGI picture, which was donated in 1923
by outgoing director Robert Langton Douglas.

Post travelled to Brazil under the sponsorship of Johan Maurits,

aristocratic governor of the newly established Dutch colony that
had been captured from Portugal in 1630. It was based in what is
now the state of Pernambuco in north-east Brazil, prized for its
rich sugar plantations. Maurits brought out scientists and artists
to study and record the cultural and natural history of New
Holland.

But Portugal reconquered the territory in 1654 — providing a

market niche for Post’s art among colonists returning to the
Netherlands. “Dutch officials and soldiers who had spent time in
Brazil . . . were interested in precise visual descriptions of the
provinces they had once lived in,” says MacNally.

Post drew most of his animals from life, often from models in a
zoo set up by Maurits, though a few represent dead specimens
that had been shot. An exception is a strangely unrealistic
“Chilean sheep” — an alpaca or llama with elongated torso and
clawed front feet, which he must have based on oral or written
accounts.

The drawings have short descriptive captions. For instance, an

armadillo is (in translation) “a kind of armoured pig, 2ft in size.
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Good to eat, tastes like chicken.” The jaguar is “a tiger, as large as

a common calf; they are very ferocious and strong.”

De Bruin believes more of Post’s unsigned works remain to be

discovered. “I am sure he would have drawn more than 34
animals during almost seven years in Brazil,” he says. “We do not
have any plant drawings but he must have drawn plants and trees
too.”

Clive Cookson is the FT’s science editor

South American Tapir © Courtesy Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem

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Six-Banded Armadillo or Yellow Armadillo © Courtesy Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem

Caiman © Courtesy Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem

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Deer © Courtesy Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem

Moustached Guenon © Courtesy Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem

‘Curious Creatures: Frans Post and Brazil’ is at the National

Gallery of Ireland from September 8 to December 9;
nationalgallery.ie

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