Dutch Brazil – Louis Renard, 1715

“Littora Brasiliae / Pascaert van Brasil“, copperplate engraving first published by Frederik de Wit, here in an unaltered edition from 1715 from Louis Renard‘s “Atlas de la Navigation et du Commerce qui se fait dans touts le Parties du Monde“. With original (?) hand colouring. Size: 49 x 56.4 cm.

The Dutch West India Company (WIC) captured Olinda and Recife from the Portuguese in 1630, as part of a broader strategy to control the lucrative sugar trade. Brazil was at the time the world’s largest sugar producer, and the Dutch sought to take over the Portuguese grip on that trade and channel the revenues through Amsterdam.

Under the enlightened governance of Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen (1637–1644), Dutch Brazil reached its zenith: scientists and artists documented the flora, fauna and population, and Recife grew into a cosmopolitan colonial capital. After his departure the Dutch authority weakened rapidly, and in 1654 the WIC capitulated to the Portuguese-Brazilian insurgents.

This decorative sea chart shows the entire eastern coast of Brazil, from the mouth of the Amazon in the northwest to the Río de la Plata in the southeast. It is a nautical chart based on the projection method that enabled sailors to plot courses using the characteristic wind rose lines (loxodromes) that criss-cross the sheet in all directions. These lines are not decorative but functional: a navigator would place a ruler on them to determine his course. On the waters surrounding the Brazilian coast we see four vessels sailing the Atlantic trade routes, carefully placed as testimony to the liveliness of those waters.

The cartouche at the bottom is a masterpiece of baroque imagination, made by Romeyn de Hooghe (1645-1708). We see Portuguese and Dutch soldiers with banners and a cross subduing indigenous warriors. To the right, in front of a hut made of leaves, stand figures with feathered headdresses; one of them drinks with quiet dignity from a silver dish, a subtle image of the barter trade and the European civilising rhetoric that accompanied colonisation. In the background a colourful procession of Brazilians passes by, with parasols held above the crowd. At the top of the hill stands a hoisting mechanism with baskets, a reference to the heavy labour by which the country’s riches were extracted. Among the figures are camels — geographically entirely out of place, but for the Amsterdam engraver simply the quintessential symbol of an exotic, distant world. At the centre of the cartouche a pineapple takes pride of place — in the 17th and 18th centuries the very icon of Brazil and of colonial wealth.

The engraving was first published in 1678 by the Amsterdam cartographer Frederik de Wit, a quarter of a century after the Dutch had definitively lost Brazil. That paradox is telling: the map appeared not as an instrument of governance, but as a reminder of grand ambitions. The plate was subsequently reused for decades by successive Amsterdam publishers, each time with only the publisher’s name updated. The present example was published by Louis Renard in 1715..

Price: Euro 850,-