ADAM EAKER: There really was a hunger, on the part of the Dutch art-buying public, for scenery that they couldn’t see out their front door.

NARRATOR: The artist Frans Post met the public’s appetite with paintings like this one. In this case, the governor of Dutch Brazil, then known as New Holland, invited Post and other artists to visit the colony to create works that would promote its riches back home.

ADAM EAKER: Even though he has individual motifs that might have been very exotic or unfamiliar, he makes sure that this is an image that is still legible to a Dutch eye. Post was imposing European landscape conventions onto this Brazilian landscape, so you have the use of atmospheric perspective to achieve the effect of recession. You have plants, even an exotic cactus used to achieve this setting off the foreground from the background.

NARRATOR: Post based this sweeping view on sketches he made of Brazil's diverse flora and fauna, such as the iguana in the bottom right. But he didn't actually paint this work until six years after his return home. Working from sketches and recollections, he grouped indigenous men, women, and children in the lower center.

ADAM EAKER: These really are the fantasies of colonial power. They do include elements of actual observation, but they’re really confections that offer a kind of perspective of ownership or conquest that doesn’t really reflect reality.

NARRATOR: Dutch rule in northern Brazil was short-lived. The Dutch eventually surrendered the colony to the Portuguese. Yet Post continued to paint landscapes such as this, perhaps out of nostalgia for what was lost.

ADAM EAKER: If the Dutch couldn’t own a piece of Brazil, they could own landscapes.