Brazilian Landscape with a House under Construction

Frans Post painted this panel in Haarlem, a good many years after he had come home from Brazil. The Mauritshuis dates it to about 1655 to 1660. A house is going up in a sunny tropical landscape, and around it the colony looks like a place where everyone gets along, European settlers, indigenous Brazilians, probably Potiguara, and enslaved Africans side by side.

The museum's own label is plain about what is missing. Post painted Brazil with a European eye for European buyers, and his pictures leave out the hard, dangerous work on the sugar plantations that enslaved people were forced to do.

The panel itself later made the Atlantic crossing. By the 1890s it belonged to Eduardo Prado, a writer and collector in São Paulo, and it stayed in São Paulo for most of the next century. It came back to Europe through dealers in London and Maastricht, and in 2002 Willem, Baron van Dedem gave it to the Friends of the Mauritshuis Foundation, which owns it today. He and then his widow kept it at their home in London until 2016.