Peter Costello
Curious Creatures: Frans Post & Brazil
exhibition curated by Niamh MacNally, National Gallery of Ireland, continues to December 9, 2018
Curious Creatures: Frans Post & Brazil
catalogue edited by Niamh MacNally (NGI, €9.95)
Frans Post: Animals in Brazil
by Alexander de Bruin (Riks Museum, Amsterdam, €19.95)
When Europeans first intruded into South America their view of the world was greatly changed. For the settled views of the Renaissance, the ‘New World’ of the Americas, its people, its plants and its animals, came as a shock, the “shock of the new”.
Something of that shock is illustrated in the current exhibition at the NGI. It is centred on a painting by Dutch artist Frans Post that has been in the collection for almost a century, ‘Brazilian Landscape with a Sugar Mill’, painted about1660.
This shows one of the first enterprises of Dutch colonialism in the Brazils (as some then called the territory): a sugar mill with black slaves from Africa.
But in the jungle in the foreground are a set of animals, some in strange poses. Recent research by Alexander de Bruin, a Dutch art historian, has cast a flood of new light on the background to these creatures, their creation and their meaning.
He had found in the course of his cataloguing work a set of anonymous drawings. Who they were by, and where were they were made was unknown, though clearly they showed South American animals.
On a family visit to the Royal Museum in Amsterdam, he saw a painting by Franz Post, a view of the town of Olinda in Brazil. There in the bush in the foreground were again copies of the animal images he had just found.
With this clue he was able to unravel the secret of Franz Post, and the connections of the drawings he had found with another painting in Paris, as well as the one in Dublin.
Detective work
Aside from the fascinating art detective work, the drawings and the paintings in which they were used, there is food for serious thought in these images. The drawings are delicate and detailed, filled with a sort of melancholy tenderness, even those which had to be drawn from dead specimens.
The Dublin painting by Post has been a favourite of mine since I was in my teens. For me it was redolent of all the romance (as it seemed to me then) of South America, of Darwin, Wallace, Col. Fawcett, even Claude Levi-Straus.
Now I know that more than romance was involved. Here in these jungles and mountain wildernesses Europe discovered the true nature, diversity and dynamism of creation which quite eclipsed man’s previous ideas. Yet what was to some the wonder of God’s creation, was to others a place of plunder.
Yet here again in the lands of not just Post’s elegant anteater and sad-eyed tapir, but of the fossil forms of the giant sloth and the glyptodon, the long vistas of the geological past of the world were laid out for Darwin, who derived from such scenes as these the notions that went into the making of his theory of evolution.
Slaves
Those slaves and the sugar mill strike some very forcibly today, being a product of colonial and post-colonial exploitation and destruction. But we need also to remember that such scenes as Post painted, such animals as he recorded, have profoundly changed the most important ideas of modern man. This is an exhibition to see and to ponder deeply.
This is a family-friendly exhibition, for a set of 19th Century stuffed specimens of some of the animals have been lent by the Natural History Museum, and the staff have prepared materials for schools and families to explore the natural history involved to enhance a visit.