This lecture examines a series of plantation landscapes made in seventeenth-century colonial Dutch Brazil. Taking up the concept of the necropastoral, this paper investigates how these seemingly idyllic scenes indicate the enormous human and environmental degradation perpetuated by the forcible extraction of labour from enslaved African people and of sugar from the Atlantic Forest.

During the period of the Dutch colonization of a portion of northeastern Brazil, Post painted the first representations of the “New World.” After his return to the Netherlands, he continued painting Brazilian themes but with fantastical elements, as seen in Landscape with Anteater, in which an anteater and an armadillo appear larger than life. Even more fanciful than the oversized creatures is the painting’s depiction of Black people living in relative harmony with Indigenous people and European colonists, giving the false impression that the violence and conflicts of slavery and colonialism did not exist there.