The Castelo São João is a Tudor-style complex covering 77,000 square metres of gross area, and it is a contemporary building - a late twentieth-century construction seasoned with genuine imported fragments. A drawbridge. Carved coats of arms. A Gothic altarpiece brought over from Europe. Inside are the arms museum, an art gallery, a library, an auditorium and the working rooms any museum needs; outside is a park with artificial lakes and large sculpture. Anyone inclined to object to architectural pastiche has plenty of material here. Visitors have not objected: TripAdvisor's users voted it the best museum in South America in 2014 and again in 2015. The building is a container, and what it was built to contain is not pastiche at all.

Frans Post crossed the Atlantic in the entourage of John Maurice of Nassau-Siegen and came home the first landscape painter of the New World. The Ricardo Brennand Institute holds fifteen of his canvases - the largest group in the world, roughly ten per cent of everything he is known to have painted, and the only collection that covers every phase of his career. Seven paintings survive that Post made while he was physically in Brazil, rather than working up later from drawings in the Netherlands. Six of the seven are in the Louvre, the Mauritshuis and the Cisneros collection. The seventh, View of Fort Frederick Hendrik, painted in Recife in 1640, hangs here: the only one still in the country it depicts.

The Dutch Brazil holdings run well past painting. There are prints made between 1644 and 1645 by engravers under Jan van Brosterhuisen, worked up from Frans Post's drawings for Caspar Barlaeus's Rerum per octennium in Brasilia; Post's originals are in the British Museum, so what survives here is the published record of a lost country. There are seventeenth-century maps by Hessel Gerritsz, Claes Visscher, Georg Marcgrave and others. There is a rare run of obsidional coins - emergency money struck between 1645 and 1654 because the Portuguese siege had strangled the supply of currency. And there is a letter from John IV of Portugal about sending two hundred men to help expel the Dutch, written in the run-up to the Battle of Guararapes, which makes it a document about how this whole story ended.

Four Gobelins tapestries from the Anciennes and Nouvelles Indes series hang here, woven after drawings by Albert Eckhout, alongside coconut cups made in the Netherlands from Brazilian material, West India Company pipes, and one of only fifteen known terrestrial globes of their size by Mateus Greuter. European painting runs from Francesco Noletti's baroque still lifes of armour to William-Adolphe Bouguereau's After the Bath of 1894. Brazilian holdings include work by Rugendas, Debret, Taunay and Telles Júnior. The library, assembled from the private collections of scholars including José Antônio Gonçalves de Mello Neto, holds more than 62,000 items and specialises in the Dutch period; among its rare books are a 1586 Jean de Léry, a 1593 Theodor de Bry, and a hand-coloured 1648 Piso and Marcgrave.

The institute opened in September 2002 with an exhibition of Albert Eckhout, showing all of his Brazilian paintings - which belong to the National Museum of Denmark - outside Europe for the first time. The permanent Frans Post display followed in 2003, inaugurated by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands during a visit to Brazil. It is a private non-profit, and it behaves like one: art history courses, education programmes for public and private school students across Pernambuco, teacher training. Ricardo Brennand died in Recife on 25 April 2020, at 92. What he had accumulated over seventy years had become, by then, one of the primary archives of the Dutch century in Brazil - held not by a national museum but by a man who started out collecting knives.