BOOKS & ARTSAbove: ‘Spider Monkey’, 1638–44, by Frans Post
Left: ‘Road Skirting the Plateau, a River in the
Distance’, c.1615–30, by Hercules Segersbecome all the rage among the surrealists.
Segers was always an artist’s artist. When
he was forced by debt to sell up in Amster-
dam in 1631 and move to Utrecht, eight of
his paintings were bought by Rembrandt,
who later acquired the original copper plate
of his ‘Tobias and the Angel’, burnished out
the figures — and the massive fish — and
appropriated the landscape for his own
‘Flight into Egypt’. The two versions hang
side-by-side in the exhibition. This was pos-
sibly one of the last prints Segers made. At
some point in the 1630s, in despair over his
family’s abject poverty, he went out and got
drunk — a state to which Van Hoogstraten
assures us he was unaccustomed — fell
down the stairs and died.
In the other half of the Philips Wing the
Rijksmuseum is staging another first: an
exhibition of Brazilian animal drawings by
Frans Post (1612–80) that have never beenseen in public before. In 1636 the 23-year-old
Post travelled to Brazil with Johan Maurits
of Nassau, newly appointed governor of the
Dutch Republic’s short-lived Brazilian colo-
ny, to record the landscape and its flora and
fauna. While there he painted topographical
views and detailed watercolours document-
ing the workings of sugar factories, and afterreturning to his native Haarlem developed
a profitable line in exotic landscapes popu-
lated by Brazilian animals.
The animals in these paintings were
always assumed to have been based on
specimens in Maurits’s private zoo, but no
working drawings were thought to have
survived. Then six years ago a sharp-eyedcurator digitising the collections at the
Noord-Hollands Archief in Haarlem came
across a group of 34 gouache and ink stud-
ies of Brazilian animals and bingo! found
they slotted neatly into Post’s landscapes
in the selfsame poses. Joined in the exhibi-
tion by a taxidermic petting zoo of stuffed
anteaters, armadillos, capybaras, sloths
and porcupines on loan from the museum
of natural history in Leiden — which, by
a stroke of luck, is closed for renovation
to make way for a newly acquired Tyran-
nosaurus rex — Post’s charming, slightly
cartoonish animal drawings make for the
ultimate family-friendly exhibition.
For Post himself, however, there was no
happy ending. Some time after the jolly por-
trait painted by his friend Frans Hals in the
1660s, his fortunes deteriorated. Gradually
the exotic animals vacated his pictures and
in 1679, when Maurits decided to make a
gift of his Brazilian views to Louis XIV and
thought it would be a nice idea if the art-
ist went along to provide a commentary, he
was tactfully informed by his agent that Post
had ‘fallen unnoticed into drunkenness’ and
would not make a commentator fit for a
king as he was suffering from the shakes. A
year later, he was dead.
Adriaen van de Velde (1636–72), whose
exhibition has just come to Dulwich Pic-
ture Gallery from the Rijksmuseum, fared
slightly better. Although less famous than
his marine painter father and brother, both
called Willem, he was relatively successful
during his short life and not forgotten after
his death: in the 18th century his works were
more sought after than Rembrandt’s. The
breezy beach scenes and bucolic visions of
Dutch Arcadias in this, his first-ever mon-Segers’s fantasy landscapes of
crumbling crags and wrinkled lava
flows are simply not of this worldON LOAN FROM THE CITY OF AMSTERDAM, 1885 NOORD-HOLLANDS ARCHIEF, HAARLEM