Jan Mostaert
Habsburg Netherlands · Renaissance
The story
Jan Mostaert painted one of the first European pictures ever to show the New World, and he did it without leaving the Netherlands. His West Indies Landscape, from around 1535, shows naked defenders scrambling over rocks against armoured Spanish soldiers and their cattle, a scene set in Spain's new American territories, though which campaign it shows is still debated.
Mostaert worked mostly in Haarlem, where he was born around 1475, in the refined tradition of early Netherlandish portrait and religious painting. For roughly a decade he was tied to the court of Margaret of Austria, the Habsburg regent of the Netherlands, though modern scholars debate how formal that appointment really was.
He lived a long life for his age, dying in Haarlem in 1552 or 1553. The West Indies Landscape now hangs in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
