The Menil Collection The Menil Collection

In 1706 the Dutch painter Dirk Valkenburg signed an agreement with Jonas Witsen, a prominent Amsterdam-based merchant and art collector. The contract required Valkenburg to travel to the Dutch-controlled colony of Surinam on the northeastern coast of South America, where Witsen owned three plantations. Valkenburg agreed to take on the roles of “accountant and painter” for Witsen, becoming responsible for the financial accounts of the enterprise and specifically tasked with capturing life-like representations of the landscape, as well as the “unusual birds and plants” he encountered. Rather than showing an opulent arrangement of exotic (to him) fruits, plants, and  animals on a plate or a table, the artist set his grouping into the equally foreign landscape of Witsen’s plantation. The composition of this painting places it into a hybrid still-life/landscape subgenre known as a “forest still life” (sometimes referred to as sottobosco, the Italian word for shrubbery or undergrowth). Gaining popularity in the mid-17th century, forest still lifes embodied the Dutch enthusiasm for enthusiasm for images of nature’s abundance. Valkenburg completed this work and its pendant, also in the Menil Collection, while in Surinam, making them among the very few Dutch paintings produced in the New World.