Qualla: Ricardo Brennand Institute

Ricardo Brennand Institute: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit guilherme jofili, CC BY 2.0. Ricardo Brennand started buying blades in the 1940s. Born in Cabo de Santo Agostinho in 1927 into a Pernambuco family of English descent, he spent his working life building factories - cement, tiles, glass, porcelain, sugar - and spent the remainder of it acquiring daggers, stilettos, swords, maces, flails, halberds and crossbows. Over six decades the collection grew to some three thousand pieces, one of the largest private assemblages of arms anywhere in the world, and eventually it needed somewhere to live. In 2002, on the western edge of Recife, he opened a castle.

Image: guilherme jofili | CC BY 2.0

Ricardo Brennand Institute: Castelo São João

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fábio Santos, CC BY 2.0. 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...

Image: Fábio Santos | CC BY 2.0

Ricardo Brennand Institute: Fifteen Frans Posts

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frans Post, Public domain. 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 kn...

Image: Frans Post | Public domain

Ricardo Brennand Institute: Coins Struck in a Siege

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit After Frans Post, Public domain. 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 ...

Image: After Frans Post | Public domain

Ricardo Brennand Institute: The Rest of the Castle

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Public domain. 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 si...

Image: William-Adolphe Bouguereau | Public domain

Ricardo Brennand Institute: Opening Night

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Luci Correia, CC BY 2.0. 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 Beatri...

Image: Luci Correia | CC BY 2.0