
Necropastoral Worldscapes in Dutch-occupied Brazil Angela Vanhaelen, Professor of Art History, McGill University, Montreal
Event details
Keynote address for “The Global Baroque: European Material Culture between Conquest, Trade and Mission, 1600–1750”, The British Academy Conferences 2025/26
This lecture examines a series of plantation landscapes made in seventeenth-century colonial Dutch Brazil. Taking up the concept of the necropastoral, this paper investigates how these seemingly idyllic scenes indicate the enormous human and environmental degradation perpetuated by the forcible extraction of labour from enslaved African people and of sugar from the Atlantic Forest.
Angela Vanhaelen is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her book The Moving Statues of 17 th -century Amsterdam: Automata, Waxworks, Fountains, Labyrinths was published by Penn State University Press in 2022, and her new book Opacity: Blackness and the Art of the Dutch Republic is forthcoming in 2025. She is also the author of The Wake of Iconoclasm: Painting the Church in the Dutch Republic (2012), and Comic Print and Theatre in Early Modern Amsterdam. Gender, Childhood, and the City (2003). With Bronwen Wilson, she is principal investigator of the research initiative Making Green Worlds: Early Modern Art and Ecologies of Globalization, which is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Image: Frans Post, View of Engenho Real, Brazil, c. 1650–55. Oil on canvas, 126 x 167 cm. Louvre, Paris. © RMN / René-Gabriel Ojéda
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