Abstract
In February 1706, the painter Dirk Valkenburg signed a four—year contract with the Amsterdam merchant Jonas Witsen. He was to serve on Witsen's Surinam plantations as bookkeeper and artist making oils, watercolours and drawings of the wildlife and inhabitants 'after life'. Two large oil paintings survive from this undertaking: one representing a 'native' village, and one a slave village. Questions relating to the choice of genre, display of painterly technique and the peculiar nature of the initial contract are discussed in the context of transforming contemporary notions regarding slavery and property. In the 1730s, in the period immediately before the emergence of scientific theories of race, a young Dutch-educated black slave produced a doctoral thesis using biblical readings to defend slavery. Portraits of this young man, bewigged and Geneva-collared, were widely circulated. Representations of slaves and blacks, it is argued, signify profound ambiguities relating to identity and property in a period when traditional and modern paradigms of servitude, personhood and the commodity overlapped.
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