Vila Wolf's Dyslexic Folklorist Ranting

Julius Goltzus

Africa, from the Four Continents

Netherlands (16th Century)

Engraving, 22 x 27.7 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This print is extremely similar to the one by the same artist of America, but instead of the conveyance being drawn by unicorns, the embodiment of Africa is being pulled along by lions. I’m not sure if the crocodiles on the carriage are meant to be real or merely carvings meant to look like crocodiles, but I’m sure the difference is negligible. Other random animals here include ostriches, dromedaries, elephants, and what I believe is meant to be a chameleon in the foreground.

Peter Paul Rubens

Bacchanalia

Netherlands (c. 1615)

Oil on Canvas, 91 x 107 cm.

Moscow, Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts.

Jaspar Beckx

Portrait of Diego Bemba, Servant of Don Miguel de Castro, Emissary of Soyo

Netherlands (1640–47)

Oil on Panel, 75 × 62 cm.

This picture by the Dutch still-life painter Jaspar Beckx belongs to a triptych owned and likely commissioned by Johann Moritz of Nassau, who served as Dutch Brazil’s governor-general from 1637 to 1644 and was an employee of the Dutch West India Company. It depicts Diego Bemba, one of two servants who accompanied the envoy from Soyo to Dutch Brazil. Dressed in a green garment accentuated with a wide white collar and metal buttons, Bemba holds a lidded woven basket receptacle for precious articles. Moritz assembled a collection of Brazilian taxidermy, rare fauna, paintings, weapons, and articles of indigenous apparel and gave choice items to Friederich Wilhelm of Brandeberg, Frederick III of Denmark, and Louis XIV of France. Moritz gave this painting, along with several others and objects collected in Brazil, to Frederick III of Denmark.

-The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Wateroverlast in Nijkerk, The Netherlands, December 1960.

Quentin Massys/Metsys

The Adoration of the Magi (detail)

Netherlands (1526)

Oil on wood

40 ½ x 31 ½ in. (102.9 x 80 cm)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Justus of Gent (Joos van Wassenhove)

The Adoration of the Magi (detail)

Netherlandish (ca. 1465)

Distemper on canvas; 109.2 x 160 cm.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Unknown Flemish painter

Man With a Sword

Dutch (colonized) Brazil (c. 1650s)

Rijksmuseum, Nederlands

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Rare Atmospheric Phenomena

Separated and Reunited in Death

These grave markers — pressed up against either side of an imposing wall, with a pair of clasped hands reaching over the wall’s top — date to a time in Dutch history when Catholic and Protestant graves were strictly segregated. A Catholic and a Protestant married couple, separated in death, arranged for this unique workaround in order to rejoin one another.

In 1842, a colonel in the Dutch cavalry, JWC van Gorkum, married a woman known as JCPH van Aefferden. The union was controversial — van Gorkum was Protestant and van Aefferden was Catholic. Despite the prevailing culture at the time, the two remained married for decades, only separating when van Gorkum died in 1880.

But when van Aefferden passed away eight years later, she couldn’t be buried with her late husband; even in death, Catholics needed to stay with their own. While alive, she made her wishes clear — she did not want to be buried in her family tomb and, instead, wished to be as close to her husband as possible. The solution, seen above, is their connected tombstones.

GOLTZIUS, Hendrick

[Dutch Baroque Era Painter and Engraver, 1558-1617] Apollo 1588 Engraving, 347 x 263 mm Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The sagging bed of a prostitute in Amsterdam, 1919.

From: The Dutch National Archives

Ancienne carte postale de Saint Martin - le marché de Marigot

@credits

Saint Martin (French: Saint-Martin; Dutch: Sint Maarten) is an island in the northeast Caribbean, approximately 300 km (190 mi) east of Puerto Rico. The 87 km2 island is divided roughly 60/40 between France (53 km2) and the Kingdom of the Netherlands (34 km2). 

It is one of the smallest sea islands divided between two nations. Based on the treaty of Concordia, of March 23, 1648,  the island of Saint Martin was to be divided between the French Kingdom and the Dutch Republic and that the peoples of St.Martin shall coexist in a cooperative manner. However, France and the Netherlands would continue to dispute over the ownership of the island until 1817 when the borders of the island were finally set.

The main cities are Philipsburg (Dutch side) and Marigot (French side). While the city with the highest population, Marigot, lies on the French side, the Dutch side is more heavily populated overall.

Historia Naturalis Brasiliae

In 1865, Charles Ledger smuggled a small collection of cinchona seedlings from South America. These special plants produced quinine, at the time the only cure for malaria. Since the British had commissioned their own team of smugglers, they declined to purchase Ledger’s seedlings. However, the Dutch, eager to develop a supply for their colonies, bought some seeds. Within ten years, cinchona trees grew in Java. By 1930, Java produced more then 95 percent of the world’s supply. The outbreak of World War II cut off the bark supply to all but the Japanese and their allies, who had quickly taken the island. Ironically, Southeast Asian seeds were then returned to Central America to establish plantations. Today, as a result of widespread drug resistance to some of its synthetic versions, cinchona’s active ingredient, quinine, has reemerged as the medicine of choice to fight the most deadly form of malaria, caused by the parasite Plasmodium falciparum. (The picture is a malaria patient in WWII.