This painting depicts a prickly pear cactus of the genus opuntia native to tropical America. The opuntia family still grows from Canada to Argentina and was common to Brazil in the seventeenth century. In an illustrative fashion, the painting shows the plant's flowers and fruit in different stages of development, even including a cut fruit in the lower left to reveal the seeds. Under the patronage of Johan Maurits of Nassau, then Dutch governor of Brazil, Albert Eckhout traveled with other artists to South America in 1637 to record the local people, flora and fauna. Working primarily from the sketches in pencil, gouache and sometimes oil on paper that Eckhout made on the spot, Georg Markgraf and Willem Piso produced the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae, the first natural history of Brazil and a compendium for centuries of the local botany, zoology, ethnography, and medicine. More than 400 of these sketches were later bound into the Theatrum Rerum Naturalium Brasiliae now preserved in the Jagiellou Library, Cracow. The artist's finished paintings are far fewer in number (see T. Thomsen, Albert Eckhout, 1938; and H.E. van Gelder, A. Eckhout, Oud-Holland, LXXV, 1960, pp. 5-30). Rüdiger Joppien has made studies of the artist (see 'The Dutch Vision of Brazil', in Johan Maurits of Nassau; and the catalogue of the exhibition, Zo wijd de wereld strekt, The Hague, Mauritshuis, Dec. 21, 1979-March 1, 1980) and has examined the present painting first hand. While allowing that no other work by Eckhout is known which is entirely comparable, Joppien believes an attribution to the artist is supported by several of its stylistic features: the careful observation and clear visual description of the plant worthy of a natural history painter; the design which employs large monumental forms contrasted with sharply delineated details; the 'clusters' of bulky forms contrasted with the 'star-like spines'; the tonality and palette, especially the shades of green; the even lighting and silhouetting of forms; details of the handling of paint in the pads of the cactus; and the division of colors in the fore- and middleground. Joppien compares aspects of the master's fruit and vegetable still lifes in the National Museum, Copenhagen (see The Hague exhibition catalogue, op. cit., 1979-80, nos. 113-6, illustrated; the entire series illustrated in Paul Gammelbo, Dutch Still Life Paintings in Danish Collections, 1960) which are composed in a frieze-like fashion on a stone ledge beneath a tall sky. He also compares the ways in which the still life elements are handled in Eckhout's large ethnographic portraits of the men and women of the local tribes, specifically noting the treatment of the palm tree silhouetted against a bright but blank sky in the Black Woman with Child (National Museum, Ethnographical Department, Copenhagen, Inv. no. EN 38A8).