chapter 12

Visual History
A Neglected Resource for the Longue Durée

Jean Gelman Taylor

Felipe Fernández-Armesto enjoins historians to study creative works of the

past. Here, he writes, is a precious source of images and sentiments that
informed thought and behaviour of peoples long gone (Fernández-Armesto
2002:152). Art and literature, he continues, help historians interpret documents
and other material evidence, which are the stuff of historical research. Peter
Burke (2001:13) reminds us that artworks, like any other of the historian’s
sources (which he calls ‘traces of the past in the present’), must be studied
within their social context. By this he means the cultural, political and material
setting, artistic conventions of the day, the circumstances in which an image
was commissioned, its intended function, and the physical location in which a
work was originally seen. Svetlana Alpers (1983) characterises Dutch painting
as ‘the art of describing’. Burke links this value for observation of detail with
urban culture, and notes that the inventor of the microscope was Dutch.1 But
painters do not see with an ‘innocent eye’. Portraits, scenes of small groups,
rural and city views are, in Burke’s words, ‘painted opinion’.2
Fernand Braudel’s methodology of the long time-span in historical studies
of society fosters asking of visual records if there are constants in topics and
themes, if there are changes in perspective (Braudel 1980:25–54). In the case of
Dutch images of Indonesia and Indonesians, a long time span allows charting
of visual experience, impact, adjustment and perspective. It yields a more sub-
tle understanding of what we may already know from written records.
Dutch artists produced a corpus of visual imagery in three centuries of inter-
action with peoples and places in the Indonesian archipelago. These images
formed and reflected sensibilities of artists and audiences in the Netherlands
and in communities across ‘voc Asia’ and the Netherlands Indies.3 These latter
included the multi-ethnic inhabitants of private households – immigrants,

1 Burke (2001:84). This was Cornelis Drebbel (1572–1633).

2 Burke (2001:19, 122). He adds that ‘photographs are no exception to this rule’, and this holds
true of the so-called ‘candid camera’ shot as well as the posed or staged photograph.
3 voc are the Dutch initials for the United East Indies Company (1602–1799). voc Asia was a
string of trading posts in Asian ports and across the Indonesian archipelago, headquartered
in Batavia (present-day Jakarta).

© jean gelman taylor, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004288058_013

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License.
182 GELMAN TAYLOR

locally born, Indigenous – as well as purchasers of artworks, apprentices and

artisans in wood- and metal-working, assistants in ateliers and photographic
studios, and local artists who came into contact with Dutch artists or their
work.
The body of Dutch art in and on Indonesia sprang from an increasingly
urban, prosperous society in Holland where, in the seventeenth century, a
growing proportion of the population could afford works of art. Art ceased to
be constrained by patronage in the Netherlands Golden Age. Alongside small
numbers of artists working on commissions for the nobility, guild artists now
produced for a mass of anonymous buyers. Art markets and auctions circu-
lated artworks, generated and responded to public demand. In every year of
the seventeenth century, 63,000–70,000 pictures were painted for a population
numbering approximately 1.85 million (North 2010:90). Inventories of well-to-
do villagers and townspeople record ownership of paintings and establish
changes in the function of art, popular values and taste. Religious art, which
had assisted the private devotions of Roman Catholics, gave way to Protestant
preference for morally instructive, mundane scenes. By the 1650s, the Dutch
buying public wanted sea- and landscapes, and the well-to-do commissioned
portraits of themselves.
This visual culture, with its secular subject matter and love for ‘the look of
things’ (Berger 1974), travelled to Indonesia’s islands. Batavia, founded in 1619,
already had an art market by 1627. In that year, Gillis Vinant’s art collection was
auctioned. This Dutch merchant had amassed 28 paintings in all. His collec-
tion included nine landscapes and seven Chinese paintings.4
Surveying three centuries of production, we find sketches, oil- and watercol­
ours, portraits, sea- and landscapes. Alongside work of the hand, we find
mechanically produced images from the earliest days of lithography in the
1840s to photographs and, from around 1912, moving pictures.5 This creative
work catered for a Dutch public avid for images of the Indies. The crowds visit-
ing colonial halls of the great international exhibitions of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries attest to the instructive and aesthetic appeal of
the image.

4 North (2010:94). Some of Vinant’s paintings are identified in the inventory by size and frame
rather than subject matter.
5 Many of the paintings and photographs I discuss here are located in the digital image collec-
tions of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (kitlv),
the Tropenmuseum (tm) of the Royal Tropical Institute (kit) and the Rijksmuseum (rm) in
Amsterdam. Text citations include archive initials with catalogue number. Websites are:
www.kitlv.nl; www.tropenmuseum.nl; and www.rijksmuseum.nl/collectie.
Visual History 183

New art forms – wood carvings, illustrated manuscripts, decorated textiles,

puppets, ritual objects of gold, silver filigree jewellery, and the like – journeyed
from Indonesian manufactories and artists’ centres to the glass cabinets of
Holland’s new museums of the nineteenth century.6 In this novel cultural
milieu, Dutch Everyman and Everywoman could now see for themselves what,
until this new age of public culture, had been hidden in the private collections
of the royal house and in the country villas of Indies nouveaux riches repatri-
ates in Holland. The longue durée approach enables us to trace a history of
deepening engagement of Dutch people in Indonesian communities over time
and place, and a history of Dutch lives there that encompassed relationships of
both kin and conqueror. This body of artworks parallels and illustrates research
interests of Peter Boomgaard whose scholarship is honoured in this book.7

From Ship’s Deck to Shore

The first works from Dutch painters were views of Indonesia’s bays, fortified
settlements and mountains concealing an unknown interior, such as View of
Batavia from the Sea (rm SK-A-2513) by Hendrick Jacobsz Dubbels (1621–1707).
While these paintings are of mighty Dutch vessels, crashing waves and stormy
skies, they establish for historians from the beginning the entwined nature of
Dutch-Indonesian relations. For the Dutch ships, anchored offshore, are sur-
rounded by smaller Asian vessels ferrying travellers and goods into port.
Going ashore brought the Dutch into relations with sellers of all kinds, introduced
women into their contacts, and led to new features of urban landscape in the archi-
pelago. A painting by Abraham Storck (1644–1708), ‘Onrust Island off Batavia’, (RM
SK-A-739), shows dry dock shipyards built to support the voc’s maritime commerce
and two windmills.8 Markets and local characters are recorded in pencil and paint.
Some were the work of amateurs, some of draughtsmen and trained artists who drew

6 The world’s first colonial museum opened in Haarlem in 1871. Its collections were later trans-
ferred to the Royal Tropical Institute, which opened in Amsterdam in 1910. Drieënhuizen
(2012) discusses three private collections of artworks assembled in the Indies and later
acquired by museums in the Netherlands.
7 Boomgaard’s publications cover Indonesia’s agriculture and livestock industries, forests,
wildlife, landholding, demography, disease and technology transfer. They are supported and
informed by visual data from the Netherlands’ rich image archives. Boomgaard’s oeuvre vali-
dates insights of historians of art and of the longue durée. See, for example, Boomgaard (1996,
2001a, 2003c, 2008a) and Boomgaard and Van Dijk (2001).
8 The flag on the main ship bears the voc logo and date 1699. Indonesian and Dutch men
scrape the hull of one of the ships.
184 GELMAN TAYLOR

what they saw on site and in their local studio, or who, on returning to Holland,
painted from sketches and memory. And some of these early instructive scenes
of the Indies were produced by artists who never left Holland.9
Four large paintings in the Rijksmuseum collection illustrate Batavia at
mid-century. Two are portraits. Much of Aelbert Cuyp’s portrait of senior mer-
chant Jacob Mathieusen, his wife and Indonesian servant is given over to
Batavia’s harbour and fort.10 The slave-servant holds an enormous payung or
umbrella over the couple who are about to repatriate. Bay, fort, slave and
payung evoke voc Asia, but Cuyp (1620–1691) never left Holland. Yet his paint-
erly imagination captured essentials of its headquarters in his depiction of
Dutch and Asian vessels and the Javanese status symbol. Some commentators
have scorned Cuyp’s depiction of the Indonesian man as fanciful, but the
Dutch artist Jacob Jansz. Coeman (c. 1636–1706), who did go to Batavia and
spent 43 years there, rendered the male slave in his portrait of the Cnoll family
in a style very similar to Cuyp’s (rm SK-A-4062). Central figures in this opulent

Figure 12.1 Abraham Storck, Onrust Island off Batavia

Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (rm SK-A-739).

9 There is no evidence Dubbels ever travelled to Java.

10 rm SK-A-2350. See Zandvliet (2002:181–182) on identification of Mathieusen. Alternative
forms of his name in voc documents are Mahuysen and Martensen.
Visual History 185

painting are senior merchant Pieter Cnoll, his part-Japanese wife Cornelia van
Nieuwenroode, and two of their daughters. In painting the Cnoll women as
Eurasians, Coeman presents an image of the voc’s female elite that we know
from birth and marriage records to be accurate (J. Taylor: 2007, 2009).
The other two paintings illustrate Batavia’s markets. Albert Eckhout’s
A Market Stall in Batavia presents (rm SK-A-4070), in the manner of a Dutch
still life, a rich assemblage of mangoes, bananas, pineapples, rambutan and
durian, some cut open to reveal their inner composition. These exotic fruits
are named for viewers on a scroll in the painting’s right-hand corner. Eckhout
(c. 1610–1665) may have derived his notions of Batavia markets from returned
travellers, for the scene he paints he never personally saw. Perhaps he viewed
tropical fruits grown under glass in Amsterdam’s botanical garden, estab-
lished in 1628. Perhaps he was inspired by his sojourn of 1637–1644 in Brazil
as commissioned painter for Johan Maurits, governor of the Dutch colony
there. The stall’s Chinese seller and Indonesian women customers tell a truth
ambiguously.11 Andries Beeckman (?-1664) painted Batavia’s fort and market
when in Holland, but based his painting on drawings he had made in
Batavia. He painted two versions, each with a different combination of the
representative characters who inhabit the central space of his canvas. The
Rijksmuseum’s version has a pair of robed Chinese men in conversation, a
Muslim teacher in white turban and robe, manual labourers in loin cloths
and head wrappers, and women in kain kebaya, one walking arm-in-arm with
a European man.12
An early overview of Batavia comes from its Chinese community in the
form of a medallion presented to Governor-General Jacques Specx as he pre-
pared to repatriate in 1632 (De Haan 1922–23:G8). It gives an urban planner’s
view of the walled city, showing the castle’s relationship to the sea-lanes, to the
young city’s neighbourhoods and environs. The obverse is engraved in Latin
and Chinese characters. This mapped image of Batavia reminds us that, at this
stage, the Dutch were more on Indonesia’s seas than on land, more turned out-
wards than to the villages and princely capitals of the interior.

11 Dutch artists often portrayed servants as cheeky thieves. Cuyp painted an Indonesian
stealing a banana from the Chinese fruit seller’s stall. Coeman, too, has painted the man-
servant surreptitiously reaching for an orange from the bowl the female servant offers the
Cnolls.
12 Batavia Castle seen from the West Side of the Kali Besar, c. 1656, rm SK-A-19. The second
version of Beeckman’s painting (Tropenmuseum, 118–167) is in the kit. Kain kebaya con-
sists of a long-sleeved blouse and a length of material wrapped around the waist, covering
the legs to the ankles.
186 GELMAN TAYLOR

Dutch Encounters with Asian Arts

The first Asian art the Dutch came to know was a natural circumstance of their
positioning within a maritime world: it was the art of China and Japan. The
Chinese exported their artworks to voc markets; the Dutch exported Japan’s
to Asia and Europe. For all three partners, art was a commodity. Asian and
European urban classes wanted to own and display art objects, both novel and
traditional. Art in the form of trade goods cultivated individual preferences for
a broadening range of creative works. We have already noted the Chinese
paintings in Vinant’s collection. Probate inventories from Batavia establish
that this was to be a characteristic of Dutch collecting in Batavia.13 Trade fig-
ures confirm the taste developed in Europe for Asian ceramics. Over two cen-
turies, the voc shipped 43 million pieces of porcelain to the Netherlands (De
Vries 2008:130).
The Chinese adapted their designs to Dutch forms, such as painted tiles for
voc markets (De Haan 1922–23:D24, D25). In turn, Dutch artists borrowed
Chinese motifs and forms. The Amsterdam artist, Cornelis Pronk (1691–1754),
for example, sent designs for a series of glazed porcelain plates to his voc con-
tacts in Batavia. They forwarded his designs to Guangdong and then shipped
the finished plates back for sale to connoisseurs of the new chinoiserie in
Europe around 1736.14 Oliver Impey and Christiaan Jörg have documented the
voc’s export trade in Japanese lacquer ware to other Asian markets and to
Holland (Impey and Jörg 2005). voc officials presented trays, boxes, chests and
cabinets as gifts to envoys and potentates everywhere they conducted busi-
ness, and so introduced a new repertoire into various cultural milieus.15
Because voc dealings with Indonesian statelets were, in the early decades of
contact, primarily on the coasts, Indigenous art the Dutch first came to know
grew out of Indonesia’s Muslim culture. Close to princely residences in port
towns the Dutch saw mosques that were distinguished by multiple roofs. VOC-
era Dutch were both observers of, and participants in, this Islamic-infused cul-
ture. The Dutchman Lucas Cardeel (d. Batavia after 1706), for instance, having
become Raden Wiraguna in the employ of Sultan Ageng of Banten (r. 1651–1683)

13 De Loos-Haaxman (1941); North and Ormrod (1998); Scalliet et al., (1999); Zandvliet
(2002).
14 Pronk’s design has a Chinese woman and maid at its centre, and Chinese men and women
alternating with birds in cartouches around the perimeter, rm AK-RBK-15939-A. Pronk’s
original drawing is catalogued as rm RP-T-1967-18.
15 On Asian luxury goods sent on voc ships to the Netherlands see Van Campen and
Hartkamp-Jonxis (2011).
Visual History 187

Figure 12.2  Cornelis Pronk, Porcelain Dish with Chinese Design

Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (rm AK-RBK-15939).

and a Muslim, designed a minaret for Banten’s principal mosque.16 Minarets

were not then a feature of Southeast Asia’s mosques. Multi-roofed structures
could not readily accommodate them. Verandas attached to a mosque housed
the local solution for alerting the congregation to prayer in the form of a large
drum (bedug).17 Cardeel’s way out for the five-roofed mosque of Banten was to
design a tower for the mosque grounds. This Dutch Muslim perhaps modelled
his minaret on the lighthouse from a remembered past in Holland.

16 kitlv 36 A-48, kitlv 27538.

17 The bedug became controversial as Indonesians travelled more in Muslim lands of the
Middle East and Central Asia. A late nineteenth century fatwa declared it an unaccept-
able substitute for the muezzin’s call to prayer (Kaptein 1997:10).
188 GELMAN TAYLOR

Through diplomatic exchange the Dutch came into contact with Islamic-
inspired art styles such as royal ‘golden letters’. These establish the skills of
Indigenous illuminators and their participation in a Muslim artistic tradition
emanating from Persia and Mughal India. Anonymous Indigenous artists
embellished text with borders of flowers and leaves in gold and coloured inks
in repeating geometric patterns, and interspersed single flowers within text to
indicate new cantos or sections. Elaborate floral frontispieces and colophons
begin and end manuscripts.18
Little influence of Indonesian art styles or themes is discernible in Dutch
paintings from this period, but Asian decorative forms migrated into European-
style furniture, such as chairs, armoires, tables and bedsteads. They were made
in Batavia workshops, crafted from Coromandel and Indonesian woods, elabo-
rately carved with flowers and foliage by Indian, Sri Lankan and Indigenous
woodworkers.19 Deon Viljoen has traced the journey of one piece, a massive
bureau-cabinet with inlays of Asian hardwoods and ivory, he believes was
commissioned from Batavia’s furniture workshops and Javanese woodcarvers
by Hendrik Swellengrebel, governor of the Cape settlement from 1739 to 1751.
On repatriation, the cabinet travelled with Swellengrebel from Cape Town to
the villa he purchased near Utrecht.20 In this micro-history we find Javanese
decorative forms incorporated into furniture showing the influence of mid-
eighteenth century Dutch and German designs. It reminds us that Javanese
were involved in the production of other ‘European’ artworks in Indonesia, for
example, mixing paints and stretching canvases in painters’ studios.

The Human Likeness: Typologies and Portraits

In the early decades of contact, the Dutch did not travel much inland. Frederik
Coyett was the first Dutchman reputed to have seen the Borobudur. That
was in 1732. It was the monument’s Buddha images that attracted his eye.
Borobudur’s wall panels, alive with men, women and heavenly beings, framed

18 See examples of royal letters in Gallop (1991, 2011:105–140); Pameran seabad 1992: fig-
ures 53–55; and examples of decorated manuscripts in Gallop (1995: figures 76–77); and
Kumar and McGlynn (1996).
19 See examples in the Rijksmuseum: BK-1994-37, BK-NM-12028-1 and NG-10998. See also De
Haan 1922–23:C1-C24.
20 Viljoen 2007:450–459. The inventory of Swellengrebel’s possessions shows he also brought
to the Netherlands Chinese and Japanese ceramics, lacquered furniture and Indian
textiles.
Visual History 189

by trees, foliage, birds and monkeys, were possibly not visible to him on
account of the dirt, rubble and plants that had accumulated over the centuries.
Coyett brought several of the Buddha sculptures back to Batavia and placed
them in the garden surrounding the villa he built just before his death in 1736.
In time his landed estate passed to Batavia’s Chinese community who, also
attracted to the Buddha images, transformed Coyett’s residence into the
Chinese temple and burial ground known as Klenteng Sentiong (now named
Vihara Buddhayana).21
For much of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, what remains
of artists’ records, therefore, are harbour city scenes, views of new suburbs out-
side Batavia’s walls, and the country estate of governors-general in Buitenzorg
(Bogor). From Johannes Rach (1720-d. Batavia 1783) there are many drawings
(ink on paper) of official buildings and residences of the voc, of churches,
tree-lined avenues and public fountains in Batavia, and of the environs of
Buitenzorg. Into these settings Rach placed representative groupings: ladies
and gentlemen of the voc elite; Chinese merchants and porters; Indigenous
working people in town and fields.22 Again we see the entwined lives of these
recognizable types. J.E. Brandes (1743–1808) has also left many views of Batavia
and Batavians, illustrations of Chinese temples, Indonesian troops, Javanese
dancers, and a coloured drawing of his own house and extensive grounds.23
Into this world of interconnected sea ports the Dutch introduced the por-
trait. voc personnel brought likenesses of relatives with them to their postings
in Asia; they commissioned portraits of themselves abroad; they had copies
made to circulate among family that was scattered across the globe. The voc
commissioned portraits of every governor-general. It became a convention to
portray these demi-royals of the Batavian Republic in the ceremonial dress
then prevailing in Holland, with rod of office and emblems of the world’s first
global corporation. The ill-fated governor-general, Adriaan Valckenier (r. 1737–
1741), for example, strikes an open pose in happier times, in wig, red velvet
jacket and intricately embroidered waistcoat before a drapery pulled aside to
allow view of a Dutch ship, the voc’s lifeline.24 His portraitist, Theodorus

21 “Dari Goenoeng Sarie ke Kelenteng Sentiong,” Kompas, 10 October 2009.

22 See Rach’s drawings from 1765–75 in the Rijksmuseum, NG-400-AA, D, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, S,
T and Y; and drawings dating from 1770–1772, kitlv 51 C-1-4.
23 198 of Brandes’s drawings are examined in De Bruijn and Raben, 2004. The Rijksmuseum
holds 600 of his watercolours and drawings. The drawing of his house is catalogued as rm
NG-1985-7-2-143.
24 Portrait of Valckenier, 1737, by Th. J. Rheen (d. Batavia 1745), rm SK-A-3778, and a copy (by
Rheen), rm SK-A-4547.
190 GELMAN TAYLOR

Justinus Rheen, had begun his artistic career in Amsterdam, but worked in
Batavia from 1737.25 The official portrait of Valckenier’s predecessor, Abraham
Patras, is also attributed to Rheen.26
Few portraits of Dutch women have survived. Of those known, most were of
wives and daughters of the voc’s elite. They stand, in the conventions of Dutch
portraiture of the age, before balustrades, Grecian urns, columns and draper-
ies. Little anchors them in place. No background scenery, flowers or animals
allow viewers to identify a specific Asian locale. Only mountains or ships
painted into the background suggest ‘the East’. While, at the time, portraits of
elite families were commissioned works of known persons, their subjects are
now often unknown to us. For example, the child holding a bunch of grapes in
a 1663 portrait by Coeman has been identified as Joanna van Riebeeck, younger
daughter of the Cape’s founder, or alternatively as Johannes van Rees, future
brother-in-law to Van Riebeeck.27 Karel Schoeman attributes another mid-
seventeenth century portrait of a young girl to Coeman on the basis of its
painterly skill and style, and assumes that Coeman painted her during his lay-
over in Cape Town on the voyage out from Holland in 1664.28
The Dutch portrait entered a world with quite different traditions governing
the public representation of men and women. In place of the portrait, which
explores an individual’s character through the face, Indonesian traditions con-
temporary with the Dutch revealed individuals through family or lineage name
and rank titles. Illustrations of heroes and heroines in manuscripts presented
them as stylized, wayang-like figures.29 An older, pre-Islamic tradition on Java
rendered kings and queens in sculpted conventions of deities.30 So it was pos-
sibly a jarring innovation when portraits of governors-general were presented
by voc officials to sultans and military allies. Did this custom induce a new
sense of self? All that can safely be said is that at least one VOC-era sultan

25 Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, Entry 66509 (www.rkd.nl).

26 rm SK-A-3777, and copy rm SK-A-4546.
27 J. Taylor (2007:70–76). The portrait in the Rijksmuseum is catalogued rm SK-A-809.
28 Schoeman (2006): back cover. The girl stands brilliant in a red dress before a leafy coun-
tryside that is threatened by rain clouds.
29 See, for example, the Princess of Jengala, Serat Panji Jayakusuma manuscript, c. 1840,
National Library of Indonesia, kbg 139, reproduced in Kumar and McGlynn (1996: x, 182),
and wayang-like travellers in a two-masted sailing ship (p. 183). Examples from Serat
Damar Wulan (British Library mss Jav. 89, early nineteenth century) are in Coster-
Wijsman (1953:153–163); Gallop (1991: figure 22); and Gallop (1995: figures 44–46).
30 For example, a late thirteenth century sculpture of Prajnaparamita, Buddhist goddess of
wisdom, is thought to represent Ken Dedes, first queen of Singhasari (National Museum
of Indonesia).
Visual History 191

Figure 12.3  J.J. Coeman, The Cnoll Family

Collection Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (rm SK-A-4062).

entered into a compact with an unknown Dutch artist to sit for his own por-
trait. This was Sultan Sayfoeddin of Tidore (r. 1657–1689).31 Apparently the sul-
tan did not long have the leisure to study his image, for his portrait embarked
on its own journeys, eventually coming to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum by way
of Poland and France.
Few named likenesses of Indonesian individuals, as distinct from representa-
tive ‘types’ in paintings and sketches, have survived from the voc centuries.
Léonard Blussé (1997) makes the case that the male servant in Coeman’s portrait
of the Cnoll family (RM SK-A-4062) is Untung, better known in Indonesian his-
tories as Surapati. Blussé traces his life from Balinese slave, to head of a Balinese
militia serving the voc, to militia commander for Amangkurat II, and finally to
ruler of his own realm in East Java. Women servants were favourite subjects for
Dutch painters, but their names are unknown. So it is an exception in this
genre to be able to identify an Indigenous woman servant in a drawing by Jan

31 Zandvliet (2002): front cover and 121. Some Indonesian dignitaries also sat for their por-
traits in the later colonial period, even though photographic portraits were then fashion-
able and cheaper. See portraits of Adipati Mandoera Djajadiningrat, kitlv 5051, and
Raden Tumenggung Kartatatanagara, kitlv 37 C-167, both painted in 1846 by Charles
William Meredith van de Velde (1818–1898).
192 GELMAN TAYLOR

Brandes (rm NG-1985-7-2-72). She was his domestic companion and carer for
his son. Brandes called her Roosje.
Javanese assistants and apprentices who worked for European artists and
draughtsmen became familiar with European art styles. Perhaps some painted
parts of large canvases as their counterparts did in Holland. The American
medical doctor and naturalist, Thomas Horsfield (1773–1859), who drew Java’s
antiquities and daily life, trained the Javanese he hired in painting techniques.
‘Javanese Procession’ by one of his Indigenous staff shows a long line of men
and women, drawn in semi-profile, but naturalistically. Some play drums,
gongs and a wind instrument; men carry aloft women in ceremonial costume;
payung bearers follow two men on horseback.32 From the early nineteenth
century some Indian and Chinese artists in Java were painting Indonesia’s flora
and fauna in the European scientific style that combined precision of observa-
tion with beautiful images (Gallop 1995: plates 31–9).

Nature Turned into Landscape

With the expansion of Dutch military and economic control into Java’s interior
in the nineteenth century, European artists came to know the hinterlands of
coastal cities. From ‘inner Java’ come paintings in which human beings, Dutch
and Indonesian, are dwarfed before magnificent mountains, embedded into the
natural landscape, rather than imposing themselves on it. Java’s mountains fill
the canvases Abraham Salm (1801–1876) painted during the 29 years he spent in
the Indies. They overwhelm the tiny figures of villagers who celebrate weddings,
walk along tracks or sail in small craft.33 Three Europeans raise their arms to the
smoking crater of Gedeh Mountain in a painting by Adrianus Johannes Bik
(1790–1872); their Indigenous attendants squat at a distance, apparently indiffer-
ent to the natural wonder before them.34 Jan Simon Gerardus Gramberg (1823–
1888) also emphasized the majesty of landscape in which Indonesians pursued
their daily lives. In his painting ‘Prahu Mountain’ (TM 3728-448) a farmer carry-
ing his load trudges through un-noticing; a man in Muslim dress studies his
book; Gramberg alone urges us to contemplate the grandeur of nature.35

32 Gallop (1995): plate 16, early nineteenth-century watercolour.

33 See, for example, View of Salak Mountain, kitlv 47 A-72 (painted 1865–1876), View of Kedong
Badak estate and the main road to Bogor, kitlv 47 D-17 (1872); and Solo River, tm 3728–417.
34 Gedeh Mountain, c. 1828, tm 3728–528.
35 Prahu Mountain, tm 3728–448. See other examples of this genre by F.C. Wilsen (tm 3728–
422; kitlv 47 A-78), and by Van de Velde (tm 4108–237).
Visual History 193

Figure 12.4  J.S.G. Gramberg, Prahu Mountain

National Museum of World Cultures (tm 3728–448).

Even subjects of historical significance could be rendered in soft, romantic

style. A painting of the all-Java highway, the Great Post Road, that Governor-
General H.W. Daendels (r. 1808–1811) called for and that shifts of Java’s corvée
labourers laid across mountains, through forests and malarial swamps over
1,000 kilometres at great cost to health and life, exemplifies this style and
mentality. The anonymous artist has painted a pleasant scene of smoothly
surfaced road winding through stepped rice fields bordered by forest and a
long view to distant mountains. Small figures of Indonesian porters and
a  covered coach are in the foreground (tm 1012–1). Nor did the turmoil,
destruction and death toll of the Diponegoro War (1825–1830) in Java intrude
into serene scenes of high mountains and luxuriant forests painted by
Antoine Auguste Joseph Payen (1792–1853), who first arrived in Java in 1817. In
one landscape, painted in 1828, a gentle light bathes the neat house of the
assistant-resident of Banyuwangi. His Indigenous servants hold a payung
above him; messengers who have travelled the Post Road bring him mail
(rm SK-A-3452).
This pastoral style continued into the twentieth century, even though
Indonesian landscapes had by then been permanently transformed by
deforestation, commercial farms, steel bridges, railways, factories, new towns
194 GELMAN TAYLOR

and denser populations. Mountains, rice fields and a huge tree suggest
unchanging countryside still overwhelms insignificant humanity in a land-
scape painted around 1954 by Jan Christiaan Poortenaar (1886–1958). A few
Indonesians sit idly in an otherwise empty scene, in which there is no trace of
modern Java’s motorized bicycles, busy markets and crowds (tm 4754–126).
Indonesian artists, such as R. Basuki Abdullah (1915–1993), also painted in this
style, called ‘Mooi Indië’ (beautiful Indies).36

Painted History

With paintings of historical events we return to the theme of artists creating

images of people and activities they themselves did not witness. Javanese man-
uscript embellishers had their own traditions of visual history. From the late
nineteenth century two history paintings by an unknown Javanese artist show a
marriage of Indigenous narrative convention and European elements. Both
are  watercolours, painted around 1890, of dramatic episodes in the reign of
Amangkurat II (r. 1677–1703). The first imagines the execution in 1680 of Prince
Trunajaya. At centre the sultan personally stabs the captured rebel with his
kris ‘Noble Blabor’ (kitlv 48 M-5). Attendants carry lances and a sword; one
holds a payung over his sultan. Trunajaya’s sisters weep. Dutchmen are incorpo-
rated into the composition as witnesses; a Javanese attending them holds aloft a
Dutch flag. The second imagines Amangkurat overseeing execution by stran-
gling in 1703 of a faithless wife and her lover (kitlv 48 M-6). Here the sultan is
elevated above the scene, seated on a stool; retainers sit cross-legged on the
ground. One holds a payung over Amangkurat, another two men pay obeisance.
Tigers maul the offending wife’s women servants who are confined, naked,
in  a  cage.37 Both historical scenes are set outdoors and framed by trees
and birds. While two-dimensional, the figures are drawn with life-like, individ-
ual features.
A colonial government building with the royal coat-of-arms, a large Dutch
flag and a crowd of uniformed military with lances drawn dominate a history
painting by Nicolaas Pieneman (1809–1860). It records Pangeran Diponegoro’s
enforced departure into exile in Sulawesi (rm SK-A-2238). Diponegoro’s cap-
ture in 1830 brought five years of warfare to an end. No major obstacle now
remained to impede the extension of Dutch power across Java. Willem I of the

36 See for example, Gedeh Volcano in West Java, tm 4818–1, painted before 1949.
37 A legend identifies the wife as Raden Ayu Lembah, her lover as Raden Soekra, and names
other prominent figures in the painting.
Visual History 195

Figure 12.5 Unknown Javanese artist, Amangkurat oversees execution of wife and lover
Universiteit Leiden, Collections kitlv (48M-6).

Netherlands (r. 1815–40) commissioned Pieneman, who specialized in painting

historical subjects and portraits of the famous, to commemorate this turning
point in Dutch-Indonesian relations. Pieneman’s conception of the traumatic
scene was based on a sketch made on the spot by F.V.H.A. de Steurs, aide-
de-camp (and son-in-law) to the commanding officer, Baron Hendrik Merkus
de Kock. Pieneman may also have consulted a study from 1835 of Diponegoro
by the Java-based Bik (tm 1574–32). The defeated prince stands in a circle of
light, looking beyond the soldiers across Java’s rice fields, past its mountains to
the inland sea that will carry him away as directed by De Kock. Pieneman
records Diponegoro’s self-identification as a Muslim emir by the green turban
on his head and clothing. Women, in Javanese dress, kneel in despair.
The Javanese artist who excelled in Dutch art techniques, who spent 22
years in Europe, and who was painter by appointment to Willem II (r. 1840–
1849), Raden Saleh (c. 1807–1880), also recreated this iconic moment, six years
after his own return to Java in 1851.38 Neither Pieneman nor Saleh acknowl-
edged Diponegoro’s illustrious descent with a payung. Saleh’s rendering of the

38 The Capture of Prince Diponegoro by Raden Saleh Syarif Bustaman, 1857, Museum Istana,
Jakarta.
196 GELMAN TAYLOR

scene stages Pieneman’s portrayal in reverse. No Dutch flag flies over the crowd.
In contrast to the glowing light of Pieneman’s painting, Saleh’s canvas is dark
and gloomy. He depicts Diponegoro’s Java by mountains and an arid landscape.
The prince’s rigid stance is interpreted by Saleh’s great-grandnephew, George
H. Hundeshagen, as angry and challenging to De Kock.39 He argues that the
painting had a surface meaning apparent to Dutch viewers and a ‘clandestine’
message of resistance for the Javanese. It is, however, doubtful if many Javanese
could have seen Saleh’s painting in 1857 (or indeed before 1978) and formed
this interpretation as it was sent to the Netherlands upon completion.40
In preparation for the painting, Saleh visited sites associated with
Diponegoro in Central Java, but in some respects he mirrored Dutch artists of
earlier times, for he painted ‘Java’ from Holland during his long European
sojourn that had begun at age fourteen in 1829. Take, for example, his portrait
of Governor-General J.C. Baud (r. 1833–1835), painted in Holland in 1835 (rm
SK-A-3799). Baud is seated before the drapery and Grecian urn of convention,
but against a dawn sky, the Buitenzorg palace and a palm tree, perhaps a scene
remembered in Holland from Saleh’s youth.41 Saleh also reflected styles of
Dutch contemporaries in painting beautiful Java. In a posthumous portrait of
Daendels, also executed in the Netherlands, the governor-general stands
against a view of mountain range and forest, before a balustrade. He points to
a map, dated 1810, of the projected route of the Post Road. There is a glimpse of
the road and tiny figures of workers, but no hint of their wretchedness in its
construction (rm SK-A-3790).

Glimpses of Modernity and Emergence of the Individual

Commissioning of official portraits of governors-general outlasted the voc

and continued, through the age of photography, until dissolution of the
Netherlands Indies. But photographic images quickly dominate the visual heri-
tage in numbers, range of subjects and geographic scope. Mechanical image-
makers imitated painters with views of majestic mountains and beautiful
scenery,42 but they also used the new device to photograph modernity in all its

39 G.H. Hundeshagen, http://www.raden-saleh-id.org/diponegorocapture.html. The article

includes a preparatory sketch Raden Saleh made for the painting in 1856.
40 The painting was hung in The Hague palace and later in the Bronbeek Military Veterans’
Home. In 1978 the Orange Nassau Foundation presented it to Indonesia.
41 Saleh had studied painting with Payen in Bogor.
42 See, for example, Salak Mountain viewed from Batutulis, before 1880, kitlv 26663, and
Confluence of Seumpo and Tjoet Rivers, Lhokseumawe, 1924, kitlv 18019.
Visual History 197

forms. Cameramen followed colonial armies, explorers and entrepreneurs

across the archipelago. From the kitlv image archive are photographs of:
army troops on the march (5202), individual officers framed in oval portraits
(2504), their gravestones in military cemeteries (3415); hillsides stripped of
their forest cover (75701); young rubber plantations (75722); railway tracks
(27038), road construction (26353), telephone poles (153978), factories (28484),
oil rigs (16734), public buildings (34531) and massive banks (35072). Batavia
stretches far beyond market and harbour; it encompasses the headquarters of
businesses (5224), the building housing the People’s Assembly (90168), schools
(1400856), parks (100624) and swimming pools (77244).
Dutch, Chinese and Indigenous men were behind the camera. Most famous
was the Javanese Kassian Cephas (1845–1912) (Knaap 1999). Cephas’s camera
recorded Java’s antiquities (kitlv 40199), its modern Dutch infrastructure
(kitlv 19367), colonial institutions (rm NG-1944-10-13-2), and ceremonies
marking the Muslim calendar (kitlv 2351). As official photographer to the sul-
tan, Cephas was admitted into the Yogya kraton to record palace dance troupes
(kitlv 3905) and make photographic portraits of Hamengkubuwono VII, his
queen and crown prince (kitlv 10002, 10003, 10005). These were portraits of
people representing office and their office’s ideals. For European consumers
Cephas photographed young women clad in floral batiks amid abundant
nature (kitlv 10727), and sentimental photos of young mothers with babies
(kitlv 10728). Cephas also photographed the social life shared by Dutch and
Javanese elites, as represented in Wayang Beber Performance at the House of
Wahidin Sudirohusudo, with G.A.J. Hazeu and Group Photo on the Back Veranda
of Wahidin Sudirohusudo’s House, including Hazeu.43
Many photographs in the kitlv archive are of family groups.44 Alongside
the history of building a colony and enmeshing Indonesians into the world
economy is the social history of a mixed society that took on local dress forms,
spoke Malay, engaged in Indonesian arts and crafts, and incorporated Java’s
hipped roofs and verandas into their domestic architecture. These family pho-
tographs challenge assumptions of segregation in colonial life. They tell us
what the demographers and statisticians document, that approximately 80%
of the Dutch in the Indies were both Indonesian and Dutch. The immediacy of
these photographs causes us to think more deeply about the quality of

43 The catalogue numbers for these two photographs are kitlv 3953 and kitlv 34594.
Wahidin (1852–1917), a medical doctor and founder of Budi Utomo, is honoured in
Indonesia as a pioneer of nationalism. Hazeu (1870–1929) was a scholar of Indonesian
languages, folklore and wayang, and advisor for Native and Arab Affairs 1907–1919.
44 See, for example: kitlv 77650, 78505, 86075, 151380 and 503394.
198 GELMAN TAYLOR

relationships between the people depicted, between them and their environ-
ment, and between viewers and viewed. They explain, in the way no written
document can, the ambiguities of colonial life, the hostility of nationalists to
people who chose the Dutch side of their personal inheritance over (and
against) the Indonesian, and the fraught meanings of ‘homeland’ for Eurasians.
Such photographs tell the end to the story that had begun when Indonesians
first ferried Dutchmen ashore, a history seventeenth-century Dutch artists had
unknowingly recorded in paint.
Well-off Indonesians also took themselves to photographic studios or sum-
moned professional photographers to their residences.45 They hung framed
photographs on their walls for public display and assembled albums that are
archives for the emergence of the individual. Photographs allow private study
of self, compel acceptance of critical scrutiny by others. Migrated to newspa-
pers, the individual’s image is subject to being discarded. Photographs chart
the emergence of elite wives and daughters from decorous seclusion on to the
public stage and so document the challenge of Dutch female immigrants to
existing class, cultural and religious conventions. Photographs commissioned
by Indonesian upper classes are a visual, datable history of becoming self-
consciously modern, and parallels the new genres of memoir and autobiogra-
phy that staged and exposed the self to reading publics.
The camera also narrates Indies lives from the perspective of Indigenous
partners in colonial rule. In 1924, Raden Toemengoeng Soerjawinoto, bupati of
Gresik, presented a souvenir album (kitlv 898) to Resident W.P. Hillen and his
wife on their departure from Surabaya. Regent Soerjawinoto’s album gives us a
clear idea of what he anticipated would prompt pleasing memories of Indies
service for his Dutch colleague. The very first photograph in the album is of the
menu from a dinner, held on 15 July 1924, for the Hillens (94782). It begins with
bouillon soup with tomatoes, and promises Veuve Cliquot demi-sec. The
regent’s handwriting labels each photograph’s subject and location in Dutch.
There are photographs of local scenery, of Soerjawinoto’s residence, the
Chinese and Arab quarters and cemeteries, plus many of the mosque, grotto
and graveyard of Sunan Giri (kitlv 94800–8) and of Njai Ageng Penatij (kitlv
94795), wife of the patih of Majapahit who raised the saint. There are photos of
Dutch installations, such as water pumping machines, a salt manufacturing
site, the Gresik railway station, a village school and a credit bank. In this assem-
blage we discern the regent’s perception of who constituted Surabaya’s elite,
his pride in Surabaya’s importance in the early history of Islam in the region,
and his conception of his own role in the modernization processes that Dutch

45 Examples from the kitlv archive are: 4184, 4747, 6354 and 119347.
Visual History 199

colonial rule was channelling into Java. There is the claiming of partnership,
not subordination.
A private album assembled by an Indigenous family around 1920 in the
Moluccas (kitlv 503) conveys the lure of the modern Dutch lifestyle for mem-
bers of an emerging middle class (H. Schulte Nordholt 2009:105–20). The fam-
ily appears to be Christian, for there are no visual indications of Islamic culture
in the photographs. While photographs in the regent’s presentation album
show elite life lived in the public gaze, these are mostly photographs of domes-
tic life, taken at home. A family group sits around a table on the veranda
(80740). Women wear kain kebaya, they hold babies (80733, 80737); a father in
singlet and trousers sits in the backyard with children beside a birdcage
(80745). Remarkable are views of their dining room with no householder pres-
ent to distract attention from the table laid with cloth and dinner service, the
dresser, cupboard with glass doors and oil lamp (80749). Two unnumbered
photographs show a mirror in the hallway and a framed snap of a family group
on the wall. In pride of place, photograph number two in the album, is the fam-
ily’s Singer sewing machine operated by a woman seated at a table (80734).
Some photos in the album appear to record service in the lower reaches of
colonial administration. It seems the family, in the course of the husband’s
career, was stationed in an ‘Alfoer’ village. The album contains photos of
curly haired men lined up in a row, naked except for a loincloth (80751), their
huts on the edge of a forest (80752, 80753). The album’s last photo is of the
father in jas tutup (collarless, buttoned jacket) and trousers, standing with
his wife, dressed in kain kebaya, outside their house (80757). Did this family,
fully clothed, occupants of the concrete house with glass windows and lace
curtains, view Moluccans as ‘Others’, as uncivilized? Did they see through
the eyes of the Dutch? Or did the Dutch perceive such Moluccans through
the eyes of other Indonesians? In making them photographable, did the
camera impose a way of looking at others? This album, assembled by the
family as a record of its own daily life, is suggestive of lifestyle and attitudes
of all those Indigenous families whose careers were bound up with the
Dutch, but who, not belonging to elite circles, have left no written testimoni-
als of their lives.
Many other photographs in the image archives offer clues to the daily life of
thousands of ordinary Indonesians. They show Indigenous men who were
lorry drivers (tm 10014093), bicycled through city streets (tm 10014702), were
factory workers (tm 60020405) and apprentice draughtsmen (tm 60020323).
We see women customers queuing at village credit institutions (tm 10001465),
sorting coffee beans (kitlv 26927) and operating sewing machines (kitlv
13110). Alongside these examples of modern lifestyles we see Indies subjects
200 GELMAN TAYLOR

Figure 12.6 Indonesian family album, Woman Seated with her Sewing Machine
Universiteit Leiden, Collections kitlv (80734).

(mostly men) becoming Indonesians in photographs that record the develop-

ment of political life in the late colony.46
The earliest moving pictures made in the Indies (1912–1913) also give a visual
history of a modernizing colony and new kinds of colonized people. Johann
Christian Lamster (1872–1954) was commissioned by Amsterdam’s Colonial
Institute to film advances achieved by a benign, rational administration in the
Indies. Lamster had already spent 15 years in the colony as soldier, civil servant,
husband and father. Before his camera women bring their babies to the colo-
nial medical officer (an Indonesian man) for smallpox inoculation, veterinary
students practice handling animals, factory workers process sisal into rope,
railway employees drive and maintain a steam locomotive. Dutch, Eurasian
and Indonesian children spill out of school and climb aboard city trams. Here
is Lamster’s vision of Holland’s colonial subjects: industrious, self-managing,
and receptive of the modern.47

***

46 See, for example, Inaugural Meeting of Sarekat Islam in Blitar, 1914, kitlv 9174; First
Congress of the National Party of Indonesia (pni) in Surabaya, 1928’, kitlv 53494; and
Second Congress of the Federation of Political Associations of the Indonesian Nation (pppki)
in Surakarta, 1929, kitlv 53480.
47 Van Dijk et al., (2010). dvd of 15 of Lamster’s films.
Visual History 201

Visual history complements and enhances the written record. It can challenge
received notions by its very focus on the daily round and raise awareness of
gaps in knowledge. It may tell us what the written record conceals. As with
written records, visual records are accidents of history in what remains and
what we select for study. In three centuries of image-making we may note
other constraints: the force of artistic conventions, for instance, that indicated
European status in Indonesia by urns, draperies, balustrades and heavy winter
clothing, or the dictates of early camera technology that controlled stance,
place and hour. Here I have drawn attention to the convention of the payung.
It indicates status in Indonesian hierarchies, but it also shows Dutch people
adapting to novel circumstances, how they tried to make themselves under-
stood or asserted rights over Indonesians.
Adopting Braudel’s long time span allows us, even from a preliminary sur-
vey of images, to chart adaptation and change through mutual interaction in
colonial histories. Seascapes give way to urban views and representative ‘types’.
Landscapes of sublime nature and insignificant humanity are, seen through
the camera’s lens, denuded hills and agricultural estates where men and
women toil. Portraits of elites give way to photos of commoners. Photographs
of officials tell us of the alliance between Dutch and Indonesian elites that
made colonial rule possible. Photographs of families and individuals signal a
modern consciousness of self.
Reliability of the visual record is a constant concern for historical study. We
have noted paintings of places and people imagined by artists who themselves
saw neither the sites nor individuals that filled their canvases, but relied on the
information of others who had. And we have noted examples of artists who did
work in the Indies but chose, in painting nature, not to see the transformations
before them that modern technology and increasing population were bringing
to Java’s countryside. The camera allowed a wider range of subjects and a
greater spread of social classes, situations and moods to be recorded. Through
its unique emphasis on the human face, the camera hints of relationships and
complications behind the staged pieces, the set expressions or pretence of
unrehearsed moment.
Through seven decades of mechanically produced images we discern the
desire of camera owners to record modern life. Thus we learn that Indonesian
Everyman and Everywoman embraced new technology. They became drivers
of lorries, operators of factory machinery. They did not shun the new. We see
adopting and adapting in Lamster’s film clip of the Indonesian paramedic vac-
cinating village babies. An intrusive medical procedure is turned into public
ceremony. Film director, vaccinator and village authorities colluded in a ‘per-
formance’. But we also learn that ‘housewives’, in submitting their babies to
202 GELMAN TAYLOR

this new medical practice, were also participants and partners in colonial
modernity.
We see altered perspectives most strikingly in the newly acquired habit of
Indonesians viewing themselves. The camera has never left Indonesian hands;
it is an indelible part of contemporary Indonesian culture. Alongside letters
and autobiography, photographs document the emergence of the named indi-
vidual in Indonesian life. This novel way of understanding self and society
began when Sultan Sayfoeddin and Roosje studied their portraits.
Artists and art forms cross cultural borders. We find a common delight in
lovely things, a shared impulse for learning, and a medium revelatory of the
hidden, the voiceless and the byways of history.