Isabel and Alfred Bader Lecture of European Art

The Dutch in the Americas
Dr Stephanie Porras

With footholds in North America, the Caribbean, South America, and along the west coast of Africa, the Dutch played a vital, yet understudied role in the early modern Americas. Via the West India Company’s transatlantic traffic in raw materials (beaver pelts, pearls, sugar, gold), refined artistic products, and people (both willing settlers and enslaved laborers), the Dutch not only extracted desirable goods and materials, but imported and contributed to varied visual and material cultures of mapping and navigation, enslavement, plantation economies, architecture and city planning across North and South America, from what is now New York to North East Brazil. The ‘Dutch’ in the Americas were not a uniform population but included French Huguenots, Swedes, Sephardic Jews, allied Indigenous groups and enslaved Africans. Outlining how the Dutch colonial project in the Americas both diverged and overlapped with their competitors, this talk considers the central role these ‘Dutch’ artists, artworks and material goods played in the Americas, presenting an alternate view of the colonial Americas.

Stephanie Porras is Professor of Art History and Chair of the Newcomb Art Department at Tulane University in New Orleans. She specializes in the visual and material cultures of Northern Europe, the Spanish world and the Dutch Atlantic, from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. She is outgoing Reviews Editor for the Art Bulletin and serves on the editorial board of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art/Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek. Her latest book, The First Viral Images: Maerten de Vos, Antwerp print and the early modern globe was published in 2023 (Pennsylvania State University press). She is also the author of Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination (Pennsylvania State University press, 2016) and The Art of the Northern Renaissance: Courts, Commerce, Devotion (Laurence King, 2018).

This program is supported by the Bader Legacy Fund and in partnership with Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, in recognition of Bader Day at Queen’s University.