Africa As Accessory

Portrayals of Africans in Dutch art, 1600-1750

Meagan Ingerson
Independence Charter School
Philadelphia, PA

NEH Seminar For School Teachers, 2013, London and Leiden

The Dutch Republic and Britain
National Endowment for the Humanities
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

The Dutch Republic was founded on rhetoric of self-governance and freedom.

During the Revolt, William of Orange called for “freedom and deliverance from the
present enslavement by cruel, foreign and bloodthirsty oppressors.” Yet half a century
later, the West India Company would hold a monopoly in the slave trade. In order to
justify this moral shift, consensus had to be built that a Christian salvation was worth an
earthly enslavement. This justification is represented in the art of the 16th, 17th and early
18th centuries, as Africans increasingly appeared in Dutch portraiture and engravings as
an extension of the Dutch Republic’s wealth, a symbol on par with tulips and ostrich
feathers.
Medieval art had used the images of Africans in much the same way, as stock
characters or figures indicating a fetish for the exotic. The most common representation
was that of the black Wise Man-King in the nativity scene. The Wise Man was portrayed
reverently, as a dignified but ultimately isolated figure. There is a later Dutch example in
Abraham Bloemaert’s “The Adoration of the Magi,” which is peopled entirely by whites,
except for the black Wise Man-King and his servant. The Wise Man-King, splendidly
dressed in a gold cape and carrying a golden goblet to present to the infant Jesus, is
nonetheless the farthest from Christ, isolated on the left-hand side of the painting. His
face is also the least exposed, as he ducks down reverently, a shadow cast by his turban.
Still, he has a certain dignity, along with the two Kings before him, and a solemnity to his
expression. In different depictions of the King, however, his African features and even
his skin tone were often “whitened” – while those of his servant were allowed to look
more traditionally “African.”
Most images of Africans, though, were of “Moors” – as this was the most
common group from Africa with which Europeans interacted. The heads of Moors
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frequently appeared on the insignia of various orders and in religious art. Throughout this
time, European contact with Africans other than “Moors” was practically non-existent:
“For five or six centuries Western man had no direct contact with men of other colors to
force him to consider the concrete question of their humanity and their spiritual vocation”
(Devisse 37). Myths like that of the Christian African king Prester John encouraged
Europeans to theoretically view sub-Saharan Africans as Christian brothers in the fight
against the Muslim Moors. This would not be tested, however, until extensive exploration
forced the two groups to interact.
As contact with sub-Saharan Africa was made, however, Europeans were
consistently disappointed with Africans’ failure to live up to their own standards of
language and social structure. Their languages were not interchangeable and were
unwritten; no “common tongue” (such as Latin) existed. Prester John, the bastion of the
Christian faith on the unknown continent, turned out not to exist. Repeatedly in firsthand
accounts of “the ‘discoverers’ attentively and consistently noted two characteristics of the
black peoples: they went about naked (a fine motive for scandal in the light of a morality
based on monotheism and a lovely selling point for the cloth trade), and they spoke
languages irreducible to those one already knew and apparently differing widely from
each other” (Devisse 229). A description of the inhabitants of the Gold Coast from 1283
summarized the people as follows: the inhabitants “are very numerous, tall of stature,
black, and observe no law” (Devisse 157). The Christian brotherhood dream thus
demolished, and without any perceived trade goods to be had, Europe turned to Africa for
its manpower.
Beginning in the 15th century, more and more black slaves were imported
throughout southern Europe. Images of Africans also became more common. Suddenly
they appeared in various scenes as pages, musicians and servants, such as in Carpaccio’s
“Black Laborers on the Quays in Venice,” which shows Africans incorporated into a
normal part of Venetian society, loading supplies onto boats. Other paintings, such as the
frescoes from the Scuola de S. Giovanni Evangelista, show black gondoliers. Philip the
Fair ordered tapestries that showed elaborate African scenes, with giraffes and black
musicians. African child slaves also became popular court accessories throughout Italy;
Isabella d’Este, for instance, ordered a “girl from four to eight years old, ‘shapely and
black as possible’” (Devisse 187). Such slaves were called moretto or moretta, and were
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frequently visible along with African pages in aristocratic portraits, a trend that would
continue in the Dutch Republic and the British Empire. One of the most famous examples
is a posthumous portrait commissioned by William III of his mother, Mary Stuart, from
artist Adriaen Hanneman. In it, Mary is seen directly facing the viewer, dressed as an
Indian princess. She wears a South American feathered cloak, and a headdress with
pearls and ostrich feathers. Such luxuries represent the extent of the Dutch trading empire
and the wealth it had amassed. Mary is also allowed to directly address the viewer, her
shoulders squared. At her side, however, is a black page, carefully fastening a pearl
bracelet to her wrist. The page also wears a pearl, another sign of his mistress’s wealth,
and looks reverently and deferentially up at her. His subservience and inferiority do not
allow him to address the viewer; he is but another sign of Mary’s wealth and status,
another acquisition of the Republic.
The value of Africa to Europe would remain its human-power for hundreds of
years, while the interior of the continent itself would be largely impenetrable. In the
Portuguese world map from 1502, the cartographer has carefully detailed the entirety of
the African coast. The Portuguese had only reached the southern tip of Africa two years
before, and yet in that time had already mapped out most of the continent’s contours,
with notes alongside naming the different geographical features and tribes. The
Portuguese fort of Elmina along the Gold Coast is spotlighted, surrounded by rough-
drawn figures of naked Africans dutifully working around it. The map shows viewers
exactly what Europe had expected of Africa’s native peoples: naked, uncivilized dark
figures dwarfed by the splendor of the European fortress. In reality, however, African
peoples exerted more control over the economic relations on the slave-trade coasts than
did the various European factions courting their favor (Reese). But this did not fit in with
the European rhetoric of an inferior populace, who needed to be kept in the custody of
their cultural and religious betters. Meanwhile, on the map, the interior of the country is
an impenetrable blank, as it would remain until the 19th century. Despite the human toll
the slave trade would take on the interior of the country, from where so many enslaved
peoples would come, Europe would know very little of it for hundreds of years.
Slavery itself was never legalized within in the Dutch Republic, and the Republic
entered the slave trade only after prolonged moral arguments. The States-General
originally refused to allow the West India Company to participate in slaveholding. The
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Directors of the WIC also consulted various theologians on the moral issues at hand
(Ford 10). Willem Usselincx, however, one of the founders of the Company, argued that
slavery was preferable to imprisonment or death, and that by converting the slaves to
Christianity the Company was in fact offering them spiritual freedom, if not actual
freedom. Anti-slavery Dutch Calvinists, however, argued that slavery or “stealing” of a
man was a violation of the Ten Commandments.
Ultimately, the pro-slave trade interests won and were further supported by
economic pressures to expand trade in the wake of the Dutch losing the colony of Brazil.
The Hamitic myth, espoused since the 4th century, also underwent resurgence as the slave
trade expanded. In 1660, Johan Picardt published Korte Beschryvinge, in which he tried
to explain the European dominance of the world. Picardt traced the lineage of Europeans
and Jews to the two favored sons of Noah, while Africans descended from Ham, who was
cursed by Noah. Such a myth was, of course, remarkably convenient for Europe: “This
implied the inferiority of the blacks and their predestination to slavery as long as their
souls had not been set free by faith” (Devisse 157). Of course, even after being
evangelized, enslaved Africans were not granted their freedom, a fact white slave-owners
overlooked. The WIC also never made use of slave images in its boardroom or in its
publicity; as Ford says, “Slavery and slave ownership were never part of the way in
which the WIC…represented itself to the world” (9). Though the slave trade represented
a significant portion of WIC business, and the Dutch transported more than 550,000
enslaved peoples to the New World (Carnes), the African here is absent. He has become a
commodity, and as such has no voice or face in the WIC.
Slavery was, however, permitted in Dutch colonies like New Amsterdam and
Surinam. Small populations of white overseers were brought in to supervise a large black
slave labor population (Ford 3). Surinam would, in fact, have the highest slave to master
proportion of any other Caribbean territory (Ford 3). Another genre of painting that
emerged during the late 17th and early 18th centuries was the plantation painting. Dutch
landowners, who often lived in Amsterdam, or other large Dutch cities and governed
their colonial properties by proxy, commissioned idyllic pastoral representations of their
plantations to decorate their homes. One such commission was given to painter Dirk
Valkenburg, who in 1706 was sent to Jonas Witsen’s Surinam plantations to document
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the local wildlife and inhabitants. He was also given a “boy servant, whom Valkenburg
was to treat not ‘like a slave’ but gently, like a child” (Ford 3).
The paintings produced by Valkenburg reflect their purpose: they show
harmonious congregations of black workers, healthy and productive. In “Plechtigheid
onder de Neegers,” Valkenburg shows a gathering of enslaved Africans, all of identical
skin color and in remarkably similar costume. Their faces are calm, almost
expressionless, and their interactions are harmonious. Such a scene was not often painted
by contemporary travelers, but it may “represent a truth about Witsen’s conduct of his
estates, and/or it might represent what he would have preferred to see at his home in
Amsterdam” (Ford 6). This harmonious, exotic scene, slightly downriver from the
overseer’s compound, shows Witsen as a kind master, protector of these simplistic,
beautiful laborers.
Valkenburg further portrays the slaves as having gleaming, muscular bodies: “the
black skin becomes a particular value in the picture… They are all collectors’ prized
examples, comparable to the pelts, furs and stuffed birds we might examine in close
proximity to the pictures” (Ford 7). The painting is an advertisement for the quality of
Witsen’s “stock.” Nearly everyone is young and the men are presented with muscled
frames. The man on the left is wearing a European hat, marking him as the group’s
leader. His pose is one of composure and strength in the midst of the celebration. Other
than the hat, however, he looks no different that the other men in the painting; he may be
the leader of the slaves, but a slave he remains nonetheless. The women are large-
breasted, many carrying small children. A couple on the right-hand side is embracing.
The implication, here, is that this group is self-reproducing, fertile. With proper (white)
oversight, the bounty of the plantation would be everlasting: “the format emphasizes their
physicality and their sociability – which one could interpret to mean their amenability to
production through labor” (Ford 8). The picture’s composition and general display of
revelry is similar to those of many Dutch white peasant pictures, but in this case the
people are not individuals. They are a mass of property of which their master may boast
of in the polite conversations at his Amsterdam home.
These were the principal representations of Africans in the Dutch Golden Age:
servants and idealized slave laborers. All served to further the myth of the white spiritual
protector, without whose patronage such people would surely be lost to the Dark
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Continent. There were also, however, on occasion exotic visitors – representatives from
African kings, for instance. An unusual narrative was written by Jacobus Elisa Joannes
Capitein, who was born in Ghana in 1717. He was purchased by a Dutch sea captain at
age eight and became part of the West India Company. His first three names all were
taken from people who owned him; his last, Capitein, is a slang reference to the “leaders”
of black communities (Ford 10). Even his name is a reminder of those who have
dominated him, and a joke at his expense. He was then sold to a Reformed minister
named Jacobus Van Goch. Van Goch brought Capitein to The Hague with him in 1728,
and Capitein was “adopted” by various philanthropists who wished to train him as a
minister, who could then return to Ghana and convert his countrymen to Christianity.
Capitein was baptized and attended the Latin school, and afterwards attended Leiden
University. His thesis was a pro-slavery argument, making the case that slavery was a
consequence of man’s fall from grace, a reflection of the Hamitic myths used to justify
the WIC’s involvement in slavery a century before. Upon his return to Africa, however,
Capitein was a great disappointment to his white benefactors. After a brief attempt to
preach the Gospel, “he took to alcohol and lived with a black woman despite being
offered a white wife” (Ford 11). Capitein ultimately rejected his white patrons’
“kindness,” preferring instead to live among his people. The experiment’s failure,
however, but was occasionally referenced as an example of the futility of the attempts to
“Christianize” the black population.
On the cover of Capitein’s thesis at Leiden is a print portrait of him. He is facing
the viewer, at a three-quarter angle. He is shown in a library, backed by elegantly bound
volumes, including the Bible. He is wearing a graduate’s robes and the collar of a
Calvinist minister (Ford 11). His natural hair is hidden by a wig, but his features are
prominently African. He has not been whitened as the Wise Man-King so often was; he is
portrayed much as a white man would have been, but with features typical of European
portraits of Africans of the time. The inscription below the portrait reads: “Beholder, look
at this MOOR, his skin is black but white is his soul, therefore JESUS Himself called him
to be a Priest. He will teach Faith, Hope and Charity to the Moors. So that they, made
white, will with him ever honor the LAMB” (Ford 11). Capitein, now that he has proven
himself against European standards of behavior and education, was now allowed to be
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represented as an individual, and the European viewer is reassured that, in fact, inside he
is just like them.
The transition of the African from a distant Christian brother to a conquered
dependent took place as economic necessity demanded a moral shift. Although the slave
trade itself was often not profitable, slave labor was extremely so. To accommodate
earlier moral misgivings, especially in a Dutch Republic founded on rhetoric of the right
to self-govern, a new dialogue had to begin. And so the black brother became a savage,
child-like figure in need of baptism and supervision. It was only in a rare case, such as
case of the Capitein, that an African y could be said to have “earned” their humanity. In
the end, a black was received only as an equal in God if he dressed as a European
dressed, spoke a dead or living European language, married according to the laws of the
Church, served as a cleric of the Church, and had lost all contact with his native culture
(Devisse 256). Of course, for the majority of the population, such a step was not possible,
for a slave had no access to education or dress that would grant them such equality. The
majority of Africans were therefore the accessories of the elite, just like the black page at
Mary Stuart’s side: silent, small, and deferentially obedient.

(illustrations below)
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Abraham Bloemaert, Adoration of the Magi, 1623-24

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Detail, Portuguese planisphere so-called Cantino’s, 1502

 10

Govert Flinck, Marcus Curius Dentatus Preferring Turnips to Gold, 1656

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Adriaen Hanneman, Posthumous Portrait of Mary I Stuart, 1664

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Dirk Valkenburgh, Plechtigheid Onder de Neege

1706
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Portrait of Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carnes, Tony. “Harlem and the Dutch Debate Over Slavery in the New Netherlands.” A
Journey Through NYC Religions, 5 March 2012. Web. 30 July 2013.
Devisse, Jean. The Image of the Black in Western Art: Volume II. London: Cambridge
University Press, 1979.
Ford, Charles. “People as Property.” Oxford Art Journal 25.1 (2002): 2-16. Print.
Reese, Ty M. “Controlling the Company: The Structure of British-Fante Relations on the
Gold Coast.” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41.1 (2013):
104-119.
Westerman, Mariet. A Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic 1585-1718. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1996.