Seascapes and Landscapes
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Published:January 2025
The second chapter, “Seascapes and Landscapes,” considers Frans Post’s coastal studies of salt mining in the Cape Verde islands and his depiction of the Brazilian sugar plantations in relation to the account books, inventories, and written records that traveled beside his pictorial record. By examining the textual accounts of the emergent slave trade beside the pictorial record produced by Post, this chapter demonstrates how painters struggled with translating the reduction of human life into an abstraction of property and value. In conclusion, the chapter demonstrates how Post’s paintings of plantations should be studied within the larger emergent legal framework around colonial enslavement, particularly the Code Noir, drafted by Jean-Baptiste Colbert at the French court.
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