Albert Eckhout

Eckhout, the son of Albert Eckhourt and Marryen Roeleffs, was born in Groningen, but his training as an artist and early career are unknown.

He painted eight life-size ethnographic representations of Brazil's inhabitants, twelve still lifes, and a large piece of dancing indigenous people.

[4] Eckhout's paintings of the African man and women speak a multi-layered language of trade, gift giving, and political alliance to their contemporary audiences, Maurits and his court.

[4] These paintings are related to the area of Africa where the Dutch had conquered the greatest number of commercial contacts during the seventeenth century, Guinea and Angola.

In the image, the woman wears a hat with peacock feathers and a small white clay pipe that is tucked into the sash at her waist.

By the sixteenth century, the term mulatto, also referred as mulacken, was used in Portugal, Spain, and their colonial possessions to classify various people, often slaves and those of mixed racial background, on the basis of the color of their skin.

The man stands on the sandy ground, framed by a tall sugar cane field to the right and a large papaya tree to the left.

[4] The uncontrollable halo of frizzy, dark-brown hair grows out of his head with his light brown eyes staring out to the viewer in a confident manner.

In addition, the flowers she is carrying and the plant life around her were Eckhout's way of representing the fertility of Brazil, drawing attention to the successful production of crops there.

Her simple but yet, slightly rumpled, white dress is a wonderful companion to this finery, although its plainness is relieved on the shoulders by epaulettes of embroidery.

The show was presented at the Instituto Ricardo Brennand in Recife, a building that had been newly erected in the city where Maurits lived during the height of his career.