Albert Eckhout (c. 1610–1665)

• Was a Dutch portrait and still life painter.
• Eckhout, the son of Albert Eckhourt and Marryen Roeleffs, was born in Groningen.
• A majority of the works attributed to him are unsigned.
• He was among the first European artists to paint scenes from the New World.
• He was in the entourage of the Dutch governor-general of Brazil, Johan Maurits, Prince of Nassau-Siegen, who took him and fellow painter Frans Post to Dutch Brazil to have them record the country's landscape, inhabitants, flora and fauna.
• Eckhout is also famous for his still-life paintings of Brazilian fruits and vegetables.
• Eckhout focused on the people, plants and animals of the region when arriving in Dutch Brazil.
• He painted eight life-size ethnographic representations of Brazil's inhabitants, twelve still lifes, and a large piece of dancing indigenous people.
• These ethnographic works, done between 1641 and 1643 for Maurits, were subsequently gifted to Maurits's cousin, King Frederick III of Denmark, and they remain in Copenhagen to this day.
• His work is said to be the first realistic images of the Tupi and Tapuya tribes of the native population of Brazil.
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