Why Isn’t Slavery Depicted in Dutch Painting?

The Dutch East India Company, or the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), was founded in 1602. As one of the first joint-stock corporations in the world, the VOC enabled Dutch citizens to invest in trade with Asia, causing a surge of capital into the newly formed Republic, a stretch of windy seacoast and easily flooded flatlands wedged out of the remains of the Holy Roman empire. Amsterdam’s population surged, and the middle class swelled.

Along with new canal houses, the new burgher class wanted paintings. The Republic was officially Calvinist, a Reformed faith that rejected images in religious worship. This meant that devotional art, once artists’ bread and butter, was no longer a profitable subject, but the demand for art spurred innovations in the form of new, secular genres like landscape, still life, and scenes of everyday life. Dutch artists produced at least five million paintings in the 17th century alone.

For a long time in art history, the VOC (and its equivalent for trade in the Atlantic, the West India Company, or WIC) were the largely unexamined engines behind the so-called Dutch Golden Age, responsible for underwriting its bounty and delivering the porcelain vases and the pepper that often feature in still life paintings. More recently, however, the VOC and WIC have come under scrutiny, resulting in the understanding that both operations were utterly dependent on buying and selling human beings.

The thing is — you don’t really see slavery depicted in Dutch art. While it was illegal in the Republic itself, some still owned enslaved people. Black people do appear in paintings, especially in religious histories, but there is nothing overt in their depiction that alludes to the inseparability of slavery from the nation’s wealth. In fact, Dutch art is remarkably coy about the whole colonial endeavor. Imported objects and spices feature in the still lifes and scenes of everyday life, but there are few paintings of sailors, or the port of Amsterdam, or life in the newly built colonies. Art historians seeking objects to help excavate this history must look again and again to works by the few artists who traveled with the WIC and VOC.

In her book, Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art (2025), Caroline Fowler advances a novel thesis — that actually, with the right focus, you can see traces of slavery in Dutch art, and more importantly, that the very development of racial capitalism underpins the characteristic aspects of the art. Key among these traces is the replacement of religious content with the secular matter of everyday life. Drawing on the interventions of Canadian-Caribbean poet M. NourBeSe Philip, Fowler weds the well-known “crisis of representation” that came with the rejection of religious art to “the emergent image of human life transubstantiated into property.”

Transubstantiation is a central doctrine of the Catholic faith, the belief that a wheaten wafer and a cup of wine, upon consecration by a priest, become the body and blood of Christ. As much as Calvinist theology rejected the possibility of divinity in images, it also rejected transubstantiation, choosing instead to see Christ’s statement to his disciples at the Last Supper that bread should be eaten and wine should be drunk “in remembrance of him” as a memorial only of Christ’s sacrifice. Fowler argues that once eliminated from the church, the work of transubstantiation, of seeing one substance in another, was transferred “from the altar to the marketplace,” as investors transformed bodies of enslaved people into marks on a ledger and profit for investors. 

Fowler explores her thesis in five chapters, each addressing a different group of artworks and artists. She summarizes previous interpretations — most of them centering familiar objects, such as Emmanuel de Witte’s “Tomb of Michiel de Ruyter in the Nieuwe Kerk” (1683) — and views them anew from the perspective of her thesis. This is to varying effect, and her points are generally stronger when linked to a specific visual concern rather than a general one, such as that Rembrandt’s ability to create an artistic persona is inextricable from the economy of enslavement. More convincing and affecting is her analysis of Frans Post’s “Landscape in Brazil with Sugar Plantation” (1660), which she reads alongside an inventory entry that accompanied the painting when it was sent to Louis XIV of France. The entry reads in part: “In the mouth of the kiln the fire is so hot that the Negro slaves prefer to die, and for this reason they poison themselves when they are able, suffering as they do with that heat. The Portuguese, to prevent them from escaping, cut their tendons.” The deadpan horror of this statement contrasts with the superficially mild painting, which a previous writer described as a “charming sugar mill.” In her interpretation, Fowler blots out the blue sky and verdant landscape to focus on the yellow flames of the kiln mouths, seeing them as a “vehicle by which to…defend the transformation of life into property” that “transfigures the violence into a single flame…an abstraction that determined the lives and fates of many as though they were abstract units of value and property.” 

In the next chapter, this heat is quenched by a discussion of the ocean, but the results are just as disturbing. The Dutch, Fowler argues, viewed the ocean as a pathless medium that belonged to no one — a belief advanced by 17th-century Dutch legal scholar Hugo Grotius, who wrote the foundational text on international maritime law — a fluid surface on which to traverse the world. Afloat on their wooden ships, the Dutch remained on the surface of the water. Fowler contrasts the buoyant experience of White Europeans to that of the enslaved people who were kept in holds for transport, sent beneath the water’s surface at considerable cost to their health to harvest pearls and coral, and thrown into the depths of the ocean when an insurance payout was deemed more profitable than sales. Prompted by the poetry of Derek Walcott, Fowler brings forward a similar contrast between the dead bodies of enslaved Africans lost at sea, and the repatriated bodies and massive tombs of dead naval heroes placed in Dutch Reformed churches, like that of Michiel de Ruyter. 

Especially in contrast to Italian art at the same time, with its relatively standard repertoire of subjects, religious homogeneity, and little-changed social hierarchies, there is an ungraspable quality to 17th-century Dutch art, with its numerous genres and subjects that shimmer between poetry and prose. This has invited theorization and generalization, from Eugène Fromentin’s Les Maitres d’Autrefois: Belgique-Holland (1857), which holds that Dutch art is strictly descriptive realism to Roland Barthes’s “The World as Object” (1972) which asserts that Dutch Art is the expression of Dutch mercantilism, and Svetlana Alpers’s Art of Describing (1983), which argues that Dutch art is a mirror-like reflection of the visual world, each hoping to capture the why behind the art. Fowler’s book vies, grimly, to be the new narrative explaining the flowering of Dutch art, identifying that fertilizer as human blood.

Like all such generalizing accounts, though, the thesis of Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art gets complicated if you look too closely. Like Alpers’s, Fowler’s book neglects the variety of 17th-century Dutch art, which encompassed much more than still lifes and church interiors, such as the theatrical paintings of Jan Steen or the histories of Pieter Lastman. Purists will likely object to the use of modern poetry as a source to replace the lost voices of Africans victim to the slave trade. And the link between transubstantiation and the abstraction of value, while intriguing, does not acknowledge the much older history of the monetary imaginary, already in place by the 14th century in the bills of exchange that allowed travel without the peril of carrying coins. There is much to be learned, however, from Fowler’s provocative account, and much to build upon.

Slavery and the Invention of Dutch Art (2025), written by Caroline Fowler and published by Duke University Press, is available for pre-order online.