Frans Post

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Frans Post
The Rio San Francisco , 1635
View of Itamaracà Island in Brazil , 1637
Hacienda , 1652 ( Landesmuseum Mainz )

Frans Post (* around 1612 in Leiden ; † 1680 in Haarlem ) was a Dutch painter who is best known for his landscape paintings, which were influenced by a stay in Brazil.

Life

Trained by his brother, the architect and painter Pieter Post (* 1608; † 1669), at the age of 25 he took part in the eight-year expedition (1636 to 1644) of Count Johann Moritz von Nassau-Siegen to Brazil. Count Johann Moritz had decided, as part of his assignment for the Dutch West India Company , to manage the recently conquered colony in northeastern Brazil, various artists and scientists (in addition to Frans Post, among others, the painter Albert Eckhout , the doctor Willem Piso and the mathematician and Astronomer Georg Markgraf ) in his company to document and record information such as geography, landscapes, regional development, etc. This is where the famous twelve-volume book on Brazilian natural history " Historia Naturalis Brasiliae " (1648), illustrated by Frans Post, was created.

Frans Post made numerous paintings of this expedition, for which he used the sketches and notes he had made on site. Because of their almost photographic fidelity, the early works created in Brazil are now important pictorial evidence of this era. It can be assumed that he influenced Zacharias Wagner (* 1614; † 1668), the “first German tropical painter”, artistically there.

Around 1641, Post also visited regions in Africa, including Luanda in what is now Angola and the island of São Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea . Both places were then centers of the transatlantic slave trade . Post was therefore one of the experts on the coasts on both sides of the Atlantic with the people and cultures living there.

plant

After his return in 1644, Frans Post painted Brazilian landscapes, transformed photographs of nature into decorative works of art that corresponded to the tastes of the Dutch public at the time, and introduced America to European painting. He spread a great variety of motifs of the Brazilian flora and fauna under a blue, South American sky and was hailed as the "Canaletto of Brazil". Numerous paintings by Frans Post can also be found in the impressively illustrated book and “report of accounts” (Rerum per octennium in Brasilia et alibi nuper gestarum) written by Caspar van Baerle in 1647 together with the cartographer and copper engraver Joan Blaeu on behalf of Moritz von Nassau-Siegen sub praefectura) about his governorship of the Dutch colony in Brazil in Recife (1637–1644).

With age, his pictures became more melancholy. The rural scenes of the late years up to 1680 often capture evening moods.

His paintings were presented in Basel and Tübingen (1990) in the Louvre in Paris (2005) and in the Haus der Kunst in Munich (2006).

Exhibitions (selection)

literature

  • Thomas Kellein (ed.): Urs-Beat Frei, Frans Post, 1612-1680 , catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition in the Kunsthalle Basel and in the Kunsthalle Tübingen . Basel, 1990

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Web links

Commons : Frans Post  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jenni Zeuske, Michael Zeuske: Frans Post in Germany: The marketing of the exoticism of colonialism on the European semi-periphery, in: Ulrich van der Heyden and Joachim Zeller (eds.): Colonialism here in Germany - A search for traces in Germany. Sutton Verlag , Erfurt 2007, ISBN 978-3-86680-269-8 , pp. 87-89.
  2. ^ Brazilian landscape, 1652 oil / oak in the Landesmuseum Mainz
personal data
SURNAME Post, Frans
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Dutch painter
DATE OF BIRTH around 1612
PLACE OF BIRTH Suffer
DATE OF DEATH 1680
Place of death Haarlem