LANDSCAPE PAINTERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 449 



made artists acquainted with many remarkable forms of exotic 

 products, including even some that belong to a tropical vege- 

 tation. Single fruits, flowers, and branches were painted 

 with much natural truth and grace by Johann Breughel, 

 whose reputation had been already established before the 

 close of the sixteenth century; but it is not until the 

 middle of the seventeenth century that we meet with land- 

 scapes, which reproduce the individual character of the torrid 

 zone, as impressed upon the artist's mind by actual observa- 

 tion. The merit of the earliest attempt at such a mode of 

 representation belongs probably, as I find from Waagen, to 

 the Flemish painter, Franz Post, of Haarlem, who accompa- 

 nied Prince Maurice of Nassau to Brazil, where that Prince, 

 who took great Interest in all subjects connected with the 

 tropical world, was Dutch Stadtholder, in the conquered 

 Portuguese possessions, from 1637 to 1644. Post continued, 

 for many years, to make studies from nature at Cape St. 

 Augustine, in the Bay of All Saints, on the shores of the 

 river St. Francisco, and at the lower course of the Amazon.* 



* Franz Post, or Poost, was born at Haarlem, in 1620, and died there 

 in 1680. His brother also accompanied Count Maurice of Nassau 

 as an architect. Of the paintings, some representing the banks of the 

 Amazon are to be seen in the picture gallery at Schleisheim while 

 others are at Berlin, Hanover, and Prague. The line engravings in 

 Barlaus, Reise des Prinzen Moritz von Nassau, and in the royal collec- 

 tion of copper-plate prints at Berlin, evince a fine conception of nature 

 in depicting the form of the coast, the nature of the ground, and 

 the vegetation. They represent musaceae, cacti, palms, different 

 species of ficus, with the well known board-like excrescences at 

 the foot of the stem, rhizophorse, and arborescent grasses. The pic- 

 turesque Brazilian voyage is made to terminate (plate iv.), singularly 

 enough, \vith a German forest of pines which surround the castle of 

 Dillenburg. The remark in the text, on the influence which the 

 establishment of botanic gardens iu Upper Italy, towards the middl* 

 of the sixteenth century, may have exercised on the knowledge of the 

 physiognomy of tropical forms of vegetation, leads me here to draw 

 attention to the well founded fact that, in the thirteenth century, 

 Albertus Magnus, who was equally energetic in promoting the Aristote- 

 lian philosophy and the pursuit of the science of nature, probably had a 

 hothouse in the convent of the Dominicans at Cologne. This cele- 

 brated man. who was suspected of sorcery on account of his speaking 

 machine, entertained the King of the Romans, William of Holland, ou 

 his passage through Cologne on the 6th of January, 1259, in a large 

 in the convent garden, where he preserved fruit trees and plant* 



