The story
On the western edge of Recife, a Tudor-style castle with battlements rises from the grounds of an old sugar plantation, the Engenho São João. It houses the Instituto Ricardo Brennand, opened in 2002 by the industrialist Ricardo Brennand, who had made his fortune in cement, glass, porcelain and sugar and who died in 2020.
The castle holds something few visitors expect in Brazil, an armoury of nearly 3,000 weapons from Europe and Asia, mostly from the 14th to the 19th century, including 27 complete suits of armour. European paintings are part of the collection too, among them After the Bath, a large nude of 1894 by the French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau.
The heart of the institute is a short chapter of local history. From 1630 to 1654 the Dutch West India Company ruled this part of Brazil from Recife, and Brennand set out to bring its images home. The picture gallery holds 15 paintings by Frans Post, the Dutch painter who arrived in 1637 with the colony's governor, Count Johan Maurits of Nassau, and became one of the first Europeans to paint the landscape of the Americas. Among them is View of Fort Frederik Hendrik from 1640, the only painting Post made in Brazil itself that remains in a Brazilian collection.
