View of Itamaracá Island in Brazil

In 1637 Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen arrived in north-eastern Brazil to govern the colony of the Dutch West India Company, and he had brought painters with him to record the place. In The Hague, meanwhile, his new house was going up, the building we now call the Mauritshuis. Frans Post, then about 25, painted this view of the island of Itamaracá on the spot that year. It is the earliest painting by him that we know, and the museum calls it the first a European painter made of Brazil.

On the back of the canvas someone wrote in Dutch what it shows. The island as seen from the south, the town up on the hill, and below it Fort Orange at the mouth of the sea. The inscription adds that this is how the Portuguese sit on a horse.

Down by the water stand four men, two Portuguese and two enslaved Africans, and the museum notes that without meaning to, Post recorded how the colony was divided by skin colour. The canvas probably went to Louis XIV of France as part of a gift from Johan Maurits in 1679. The Rijksmuseum bought it in Paris in 1879, and it has been on loan here since 1953.