This 17th-Century Dutch Painting Was Rescued From a Dusty Barn Attic in Connecticut. It Just Sold for More Than $7 Million
Painted in 1666, “View of Olinda, Brazil, With Ruins of the Jesuit Church” is a masterpiece by Frans Post, one of the first European-trained artists to depict the landscapes of Dutch Brazil
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/accounts/headshot/eli2.png)
The painting discovered in the attic of a barn in Connecticut nearly three decades ago was all but impossible to recognize.
“It was filthy, black, dirty,” George Wachter, the chairman of Sotheby’s North and South America, tells Robb Report’s Julie Belcove. “You could hardly see it.”
But Wachter had a hunch that a great painting lay beneath the filth. He entreated the collectors Jordan and Thomas Saunders to acquire it for $2.2 million in 1998, according to the Art Newspaper’s Carlie Porterfield. They brought it to Nancy Krieg, a leading art conservator in New York City. With chemical solvents and soft cotton swabs, she pulled back the grime of many decades. A blue sky emerged. Then the ruins of a church; enslaved men and women carrying baskets; and an assemblage of New World animals, including an anteater and armadillo.
Wachter’s hunch turned out to be right. This lush pastoral scene rescued from the barn’s attic in 1998 is View of Olinda, Brazil, With Ruins of the Jesuit Church, a 1666 painting by Dutch artist Frans Post. Less than two minutes after it reached the auction block at Sotheby’s last month, it sold for more than $7 million, including fees.
That hammer price is a record for Post, who was born in 1612 in the Dutch city of Haarlem to a family of artists. At the age of 24, Post traveled to Dutch Brazil, a former colony in the northeast of the modern-day country, as part of the “retinue” of the colonial governor John Maurice of Nassau, according to Sotheby’s.
Only seven canvases painted by Post while he was in Brazil remain, but his eight-year sojourn provided enough subject matter for a lifetime. When he returned to Europe, he was an incredibly in-demand artist. He was one of the few European-trained painters to specialize in the landscape of the Americas, and he was among an even more exclusive coterie of those who could claim to have seen the flora, fauna, landscapes and people first-hand.
His first major market was former merchants and colonial administrators who longed for a souvenir of their time in Brazil. Because they themselves had seen the sights, they demanded accuracy and recognizable detail.
Within a few years, Post’s market had again shifted to “new buyers more interested in the exotic idea of Brazil, rather than the true portrayal of its native landscape,” according to Sotheby’s. Those clients had never been to Brazil and were less concerned with accuracy.
View of Olinda, Brazil, With Ruins of the Jesuit Church shows how Post changed his compositions to accommodate this demand. While still relying on his memories and detailed sketches, Post’s 1666 painting is a hodgepodge of different scenes arranged together on one canvas.
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/eb/07/eb073c18-a776-4b05-a8ee-fd6d590bbfa9/nl-hlmnha_53004670_reuzenmiereneter.jpeg)
In the bottom left of the canvas, viewers will notice a diverse array of exotic animals and plants. A large lizard, a white bird, an anteater and an armadillo cluster around a pineapple plant. In the lower center, enslaved men and women carry baskets through a field. Another group of people walks toward the ruins at right, identified as the Jesuit church of Our Lady of Graces in Olinda.
These features, positioned in front of the Beberibe River and beneath a perfect blue sky dotted with puffy clouds, represent “[almost more] of a capriccio, an imagined landscape, than one that is topographically accurate,” Daria Foner, an old masters specialist at Sotheby’s, says in a video. “But I think that makes it all the more evocative.”
For generations of buyers, that assessment rang true. Before it ended up in a private collection (and a dusty barn attic) in Connecticut, the painting was owned by a series of Parisians, likely including Joseph Fesch, Napoleon’s maternal uncle.
David Pollack, the head of old master paintings at the auction house, tells Robb Report that Post’s View of Olinda, Brazil, With Ruins of the Jesuit Church, which measures more than 35 inches long and 23 inches high, was “one of his greatest.”
“He was painting for a very open, ready market,” Pollack adds. “This was his calling card, these views of Brazil. And to have something on this scale certainly ranks it in the top tier, no doubt.”
