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Mameluke (Mameluca)
Eeckhout, Albert van der, fl. 1637-1664
1641
Albert Eckhout arrived in Dutch Brazil in 1637 as the newly-appointed official painter for the colony’s governor, Johan Mauritius van Nassau-Siegen. In this official role, he assumed the task of the creation of a number of ethnographic paintings, one of which is Mameluca, completed in 1641. Brienen notes that this image is the earliest existing painting depicting a mameluca, or a person of mixed European and Tupinamba heritage. This work offers a visual representation of many of the European assumptions regarding women of mixed racial origin, including their inherent sexual desirability and availability. When Eckhout created this image, according to Brienen, there was no existing iconographic vocabulary for mestizos or mulattos, thus Mameluca serves as a key source for later artists (132). Currently scholarly literature calls into question the signatures and dates of many of Eckhout’s ethnographic images, citing that theoretically, they could have been completed at any time between 1637 and 1644. Although this work is signed and dated, elements of Mameluca such as the cashews seem to be unfinished (36). This debate is part of a larger discourse; scholars question whether Eckhout’s paintings were completed in Brazil or the Netherlands. Despite questions concerning the specifics of when and where this work was completed, it remains important to the art historical narrative as part of Eckhout’s ethnographic portraits, the first life-size depictions of indigenous inhabitants of the American content by a European artist. Consulted Sources: Brienen, Rebecca Parker. Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006. By Lauren Howe
Brazil
Dinamarca -- Copenhague -- Nationalmuseet Denmark -- Copenhagen
271 × 170 cm
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Still image
Paintings (Visual works)
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