Portrait of Jan Valckenburgh and an Enslaved Servant

Jan Valckenburgh twice served the West India Company as director-general at Elmina, on the coast of present-day Ghana, from 1656 to 1659 and again from 1663 to 1667. Vertangen painted him in Amsterdam around 1660, between those two terms. He wears armour and holds a commander's baton, and through the opening at the right lies the fort of Elmina itself. There the Company organised the trade in people whom African traders brought to the coast to sell to the Dutch. In all, the museum notes, some 550,000 Africans were carried to the Americas and the Caribbean on Dutch ships. The young man behind him, holding a gold reward medal over a helmet, was one of the people enslaved in that trade. The museum's older records call the picture simply Portrait of Jan Valckenburgh, and its title now names them both.