The emergence of paintings of Brazil in the 17th century coincides with the new visual possibilities developed by the Dutch. The new art, inheriting the Flemish tradition, affirmed the autonomy of landscape painting, but did not prevent the reassertion of tradition with regard to topography, the celebration of battles, and imaginary visions of a new world.
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| Gillis Peeters - View of Recife and its Port -1639 |
The painting entitled Country with Europeans Landing in Amerindian Territory, of the school of Gillis Peeters {Fig.2), shows the persistence of imagination in the age of discovery as opposed to accurate recording of the special characteristics of the American landscape. Other works of this type by Bonaventura Peeters are known to exist, and these pictures of European landings share certain features, all of them using a technique common in Dutch painting, namely a dark foreground from which the observer looks out at water and sky which lose themselves in the distance.
The perspective of the landings is thus a subjective view of man in nature. The scene is shown in such a way that the Europeans could be arriving in Brazil, where the inhabitants are semi-naked Indians wearing girdles of feathers, or in Africa, if one looks at the type of dwellings and parasols. The combination is only surprising if one forgets that these pictures were painted in Europe, where African and Brazilian images were merged in the general Dutch vision of empire.