A harbour town in North Holland, Hoorn was the seat of the Dutch West India Company (WIC), which (in its second incarnation) had begun to focus on the transatlantic slave trade.

[2] In West Friesland, where Hoorn is one of the major cities, there were two people of colour—de Bruin and a man named Cornelis Valentijn, who had come from the Dutch East Indies.

The inheritance, van Bredehoff noted, was to set de Bruin up in business and prevent him from "falling back into heathendom".

Interest in the Dutch history of slavery grew before 2013, when the 150th anniversary of abolition was commemorated, and this led to researchers looking into the two West-Frisian (former) slaves, de Bruin and Cornelis Valentijn.

[1] The portrait shows the two men standing on the dike of the Beemsterringvaart, with van Bredehoff pointing at his family home on the other side of the canal (it was built by his father after 1686, and demolished in 1863[5]).