Donna americana

In the 1640s the Dutch briefly held a stretch of northeast Brazil, and their governor, Johan Maurits, wanted the colony recorded. He kept painters on hand, and Eckhout was the one who painted its people at life size. This woman, of African descent in the colony, stands barefoot on a shoreline with a small child at her side and a basket of tropical fruit balanced on her head. The title calls her American because she belongs to a set Eckhout made of the different peoples living under Dutch rule there, from the Tupi and Tapuya to Africans brought across for the sugar plantations. When the Dutch lost the colony, Johan Maurits gave the whole group of figures to King Frederick III of Denmark in 1654, which is how a scene from the Brazilian coast has hung in Copenhagen ever since.