Depicting Race

This paper explores the background and historical context of a newly discovered mid-nineteenth-century portrait of Aquasi Boachi and Kwame Poku, two princes from present-day Ghana who came to the Netherlands in 1837. The portrait—recently acquired by Rijksmuseum Boerhaave—appears to originate from the collection of the Dutch naturalist and physical anthropologist Jan van der Hoeven (1801–1868) the author of one of the fist books on the anthropology of African people to be published in the Netherlands (1842). I will show the portrait was part of a broader anthropological collection, which—apart from a large number of “national skulls”—included “characteristic portraits” of various human races, including Africans. I describe what role the portrait played in Van der Hoeven’s collection and how it reveals deeply held convictions of Van der Hoeven and contemporaries about the fundamental “otherness” of the African race.