A Brazilian Landscape

A wide tropical vista stretches beneath a luminous sky — distant mountains, a palm-fringed river, and the tiny figures of colonists and indigenous people going about their work. Frans Post was the first Dutch painter to paint South American landscapes from direct observation, having accompanied the Dutch governor to Brazil in 1637, and this panoramic panel captures the light and vegetation of the New World with a documentary freshness unique in seventeenth-century art.