Frans Post

Frans Janszoon Post was a Dutch painter who started his career in Haarlem, the Netherlands, where he likely studied under his brother, the architect Pieter Jansz Post (1608-1669), and attended the workshops of Pieter Molijn (1595-1661), Salomon van Ruysdael (ca.1602-1670), and Salomon de Bray (1597-1664). Recommended by his brother to Count Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen, the governor-general of Dutch Brazil, Post joined the expedition to Brazil in 1637 alongside notable artists such as Albert Eckhout (ca.1610-ca.1666) and Georg Marcgraf (1610-1644). As a landscape painter, Post was tasked with documenting topography, military and civil architecture, and scenes of naval and land battles.

Post’s oil paintings created in Brazil did not cater to exoticism; instead, his landscapes were serene and true to reality. He returned to the Netherlands in 1644 and continued to paint Brazilian themes, producing about a hundred oil paintings based on his sketches and drawings to which he started adding exotic elements from tropical fauna and flora. In 1646, he joined the Guild of Saint Luke in Haarlem, a requirement for painters not in court service, and later became its director and treasurer.

Post also contributed illustrations from his extensive sketches of Brazil to the book "Rerum per Octennium in Brasília" by Gaspar Barléu (1584-1648), which recounted Johan Maurits’s achievements during his eight-year governance in Brazil, published in 1647.

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Text: Blombô research and curation, with the support of artificial intelligence for content writing and structuring.