The Old Indies at the French Court: Johan Maurits’s Gift to Louis XIV

Authors

  • Carrie Anderson Middlebury College, Vermont

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18352/emlc.89

Keywords:

Johan Maurits, Louis XIV, Dutch Brazil, diplomacy, gift exchange, Old Indies, Ambassador’s Staircase

Abstract

In 1679 Prince Johan Maurits (1604-1679), the former governor-general of Dutch Brazil, presented French King Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715) with an extravagant gift comprised of Brazilian-themed images and objects, including a set of eight cartoons by the Dutch artist Albert Eckhout (1610-1665), which would be transformed into a set of tapestries known as the Old Indies (Anciennes Indes). This article will focus on the points of convergence between the Old Indies and the Escalier des Ambassadeurs, or Ambassador’s Staircase, at Versailles – the decoration of which was being completed at the same time Johan Maurits presented his gift. Aimed at making tangible the possibility of colonial conquest, the immersive environments created by the tapestries and the staircase’s convincingly painted spectacle blurred the boundaries between reality and representation, mediating an ideological space that existed between the static, centralized authority of the French court and the far-flung colonial possessions it sought to acquire.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Carrie Anderson, Middlebury College, Vermont

Carrie Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Art History at Middlebury College, Vermont. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Early Modern History and Artl@s Bulletin and she coedited the spring 2018 special issue ‘Coordinates’ for Journal18. Her current book project, Dutch Gifts. The Art of Diplomacy at Home and Abroad, 1600-1750, repositions Dutch intra-and intercultural diplomacy within the array of texts, images, and objects that shaped the practice.

Downloads

Published

2019-06-24

How to Cite

Anderson, C. (2019). The Old Indies at the French Court: Johan Maurits’s Gift to Louis XIV. Early Modern Low Countries (EMLC), 3(1), 32–59. https://doi.org/10.18352/emlc.89

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2019)

Section

Article

License

Copyright (c) 2019 Carrie Anderson

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Authors who publish with EMLC agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) or a Creative Commons NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors are explicitly encouraged to deposit their article in their institutional repository.