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“Exploring the Absence of Slavery in Dutch Painting”

“Exploring the Absence of Slavery in Dutch Painting”


**The Shadow of Wealth: Unpacking Slavery’s Role in Dutch Art and the VOC Legacy**

The Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC), established in 1602, has long been celebrated as a pioneering force in global trade and economic innovation. Serving as one of the first joint-stock companies, it helped transform a small nation of windmills and flooded plains into a dominant global powerhouse. While the VOC’s contributions to financial markets and Amsterdam’s cultural efflorescence are widely acknowledged, recent scholarship has sought to illuminate the darker undercurrents of this “golden age.” Slavery—a crucial driver of wealth in this era—has increasingly been recognized as an unspoken yet integral element of the VOC’s operations, with Dutch art serving as both a revealing and obfuscating lens of this history.

### The “Golden Age” and Its Cultural Boom

During the 17th century, as VOC ships navigated the spice routes and the halls of Amsterdam buzzed with trade discussions, the Dutch Republic witnessed an unprecedented rise in art production. Fueled by the burgeoning middle class, over five million paintings were created during this century alone. With the Republic professing a Calvinist faith that rejected religious imagery, Dutch artists innovated new secular genres such as still lifes, landscapes, and scenes from everyday life. Art became a mirror of societal prosperity, capturing images of fruits imported from Asia, fine porcelain, and pepper—a key commodity in the international spice trade.

However, despite the aesthetic beauty of these works, they often concealed their foundational links to the exploitative systems that made such wealth possible. While religious and everyday scenes appear disarmingly focused on the surface, scholars have become increasingly critical of Dutch art’s reluctance to confront its entanglement with the violent colonial and slave economies underpinning this “golden age.”

### A Legacy of Erasure

The VOC, and its equivalent for Atlantic trade, the West India Company (WIC), relied heavily on the labor and suffering of enslaved people. While slavery was technically illegal within the Dutch Republic itself, it was a central pillar of the empire’s overseas operations. Enslaved laborers farmed sugar plantations, extracted pearls from ocean depths, and served in colonial households. Yet their presence, and the brutality they endured, are conspicuously absent in much of Dutch art of the period. Paintings celebrated imports—luxurious textiles, exotic foods, and spices—but disconnected them from the human toll of their acquisition.

One might expect depictions of port cities, maritime trade, or colonies teeming with such activity, but Dutch art often sidesteps the colonial narrative altogether. What it chooses to depict, and equally what it leaves out, speaks volumes about its role in perpetuating societal memory—or erasure.

### A New Perspective: Caroline Fowler and Dutch Art’s Invisible Threads

Emerging scholarship has endeavored to connect these historical dots. In her provocative work, *Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art* (2025), art historian Caroline Fowler examines the traces of racial capitalism that permeate Dutch art. Fowler argues that the rejection of religious imagery, and its substitution with secular subject matter, was tied to the mechanisms of colonial economic systems. These transformations, she posits, subtly mirror the commodification of human life central to slavery.

One of Fowler’s central arguments is that the Calvinist rejection of Catholic transubstantiation—a doctrine affirming the literal transformation of bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood—found secular reincarnations in the marketplace. While Calvinists rejected this sacred transformation, they came to embrace the concept of assigning abstract value to human lives, transferring “conversion” from the altar to ledgers. Investors viewing enslaved bodies as convertible marks on balance sheets echoes this notion of “transubstantiating” human beings into property.

### Art as a Silent Witness to Subjugation

The troubling links between art and slavery become unsettlingly clear when examined through Fowler’s lens. Consider Frans Post’s idyllic landscape, *Landscape in Brazil with Sugar Plantation* (1660). On its surface, the painting depicts a tranquil depiction of agriculture and nature. However, Post’s serene brushstrokes mask the violence inherent in his subject. Historical records detailing conditions on sugar plantations describe the horrendous treatment of enslaved workers, including poisonings and tendon mutilation. The painting, Fowler argues, abstracts this terror, focusing instead on the visual charm of sugar production while erasing the human suffering fueling it.

Similarly, scenes of luxury often frame exotic goods—pepper, porcelain, and even tulips—as symbols of Dutch affluence. Jan Jansz van de Velde’s *Still Life with a Beer Glass and a Porcelain Dish with Pepper* (1647) exemplifies this, its ordered simplicity and harmony disguising the exploitative systems embedded in its creation. Pepper, especially, was a product of forced labor in colonial plantations, its spice masking a