1

Dutch still lifes and colonial visual culture in the Netherlands Indies,

18001949

Susie Protschky1

Abstract

This essay examines Dutch still lifes in the Netherlands oldest and most prestigious overseas

possession the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia) during the nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. Early modern scholars have cogently argued that Dutch flower pieces

from the seventeenth century typically reflected georgic discourses on human mastery over

nature. However, three centuries later flowers were largely absent from colonial still lifes:

painters and photographers were more inclined to depict tropical fruits, a preference which

reflects the development of modern colonial discourses of an abundant tropics, where nature

flourished even in the absence of cultivation. Such notions were commonly employed by

Europeans in Southeast Asia to justify the need for colonial intervention in the tropics while

minimising the role of Asian labour in enriching European economies.

Keywords

Still life, Netherlands Indies, colonial Indonesia, nineteenth century, twentieth century,

painting, photography

Introduction

Early modern specialists will have noted a recent resurgence in studies of seventeenth century

Dutch still life paintings.1 Given that current interpretations of Golden Age still lifes

frequently emphasize the imperial cultures and economies within which such images

1 This is the pre-publication version approved by the editors of Art History. For copyright

reasons the illustrations have been ommitted. To see the illustrations, and to cite from this

article (using the correct page span), see the final published version in the journal Art History,

Vol 34, Issue 3, 2011, pp. 510-535.

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circulated, the dearth of research on still lifes produced in Dutch colonies themselves is

striking: most studies continue to focus on images made in Europe.2 Further, little work has

been done to examine colonial still lifes beyond the early modern context. What can still life

images reveal about the visual culture of a Dutch colony in the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, in the era of new imperialism, and after the invention of photography and the

advent of modernism? How do modern colonial still lifes compare to their early-modern

predecessors, and what historical factors account for continuities and changes in their form

and meaning over time?

This essay begins to address these questions through an examination of still life

images produced in the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia) two centuries after the end of

the Golden Age. The Indies was the oldest, most prestigious and lucrative Crown colony

remaining to the Dutch in the early nineteenth century after the demise of the VOC

(Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or United East India Company) in 1800. In the Indies,

still lifes remained a popular genre both in paintings and in the new medium of photography

throughout the colonial period, from the nineteenth century until Indonesian independence in

1949. Further, colonial still lifes frequently retained the familiar compositional form of

seventeenth-century images. I argue that this historical continuity is accounted for by the high

value that continued to be placed on botanical drawing and collecting in the Netherlands

Indies, two forms of visual representation that resonated strongly with still life images.

Svetlana Alpers contention that seventeenth-century Dutch art was one of describing,

concerned with the surfaces and physical properties of things,3 continues to be relevant for

understanding visual culture in the Indies during the modern colonial period.

Where modern Indies still lifes differed from their seventeenth-century Dutch

predecessors was in their persistent focus on tropical fruits above most other subjects. While

Golden Age still lifes typically reflected georgic discourses on human mastery over nature,

3

particularly in flower pieces, Indies still lifes, by contrast, reflected colonial notions of

tropicality. David Arnold and others have contended that the tropics were conceived by

Europeans as a region whose climate and topography inspired distinctive scientific, literary

and visual discourses in European culture.4 Colonial notions of tropical abundance justified

the need for colonial intervention and coercion in the Indies while minimizing the role of

Asian labour in enriching European economies. In focusing on fruits more than flowers or

other subjects, I argue that colonial still lifes celebrated a vision of tropicality where nature

flourished largely free from the civilizing touch of culture.

Colonial still lifes were therefore iconographically distinct from their historical

predecessors that is, they differed substantively in meaning from early-modern images.

Since tropical fruits circulated as food goods largely outside the sphere of international

colonial capitalism, they cannot constitute commodity fetishes of the variety that scholars

typically identitify in their analyses of Golden Age still lifes.5 Unlike seventeenth-century

paintings, which frequently featured the very items of commerce that powered the Dutch

economy, modern images of tropical fruits gave colonial audiences no cause to reflect on the

foundation of the Netherlands Indies economy, which was in fact plantation crops. The wealth

of the Dutch Republic created an ambivalent visual culture in the seventeenth century, Simon

Schama has posited, one concerned with beauty and luxury but also with the moral dangers of

overvloed (excess).6 Such moral ambivalence is lacking in nineteenth- and twentieth-century

still lifes from the Netherlands Indies, since they show subsistence foods rather than cash

crops. The aversion in modern Dutch still lifes to displaying the true sources of colonial

wealth (and the role of Asian labour in generating it) is entirely in keeping with a visual

culture in the Netherlands Indies that minimized evidence of colonial intervention in rural

economies and societies.7

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Conceptual approaches to still life paintings from the Dutch Golden Age: An overview

Although still life ranked among the lesser genres of painting in the Low Countries beneath

history painting and portraiture, and somewhere between landscapes and low-life scenes of

taverns and brothels8 Julie Berger Hochstrassers work in particular has shown that there

was a significant market for these images in the Dutch Republic, particularly in the first half

of the seventeenth century, and that still lifes did contain symbolic content of significant

cultural import.9 Far from being devoid of narrative and meaning, images of food items,

flowers and household objects provide important historical insights into various aspects of

seventeenth-century Dutch culture and the economic development of the Republic. Mid-

twentieth-century art-historical approaches to interpreting still lifes were largely

iconographical in nature, inspired by the scholarship of Erwin Panofsky and exemplified by

the influential work of Eddy de Jongh from the late 1960s onwards.10

Such approaches were

popularized by Simon Schama after 1987 in his now classic study of seventeenth-century

Dutch culture, The Embarrassment of Riches.11

Iconologists examine the symbolic and moral

content of still life paintings, on the assumption that the objects in such images have an

historically and culturally specific meaning which can be corroborated by reference to

contemporaneous texts, emblems and other images.12

In recent years particularly in the

work of Hochstrasser (which will be returned to shortly) elements of the iconographical

approach have been revived in the guise of symbolic anthropology.13

Indeed, the method of

analyzing images within a broader cultural context beyond the immediate social and

economic concerns of the artist who produced them is a useful approach that has gained wide

currency, as attested to by the multi-disciplinary growth of visual culture studies in recent

decades.14

Svetlana Alpers important work, The Art of Describing (1983), has gone some way

toward fostering the development of new approaches to visual sources, as well as extending

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the manner in which seventeenth-century Dutch painting in particular can be interpreted.15

Alpers focus was less on the moral symbolism underpinning Dutch art and more on the

intellectual culture in which it was produced. She argued that the painterly preoccupation in

the Low Countries with the surface of things with observation and empiricism, and with

using tools such as lenses and the camera obscura to refine the way in which the world could

both be understood and represented linked Dutch visual culture with the development of

early-modern European science.16

Further, Alpers and other scholars who have followed her

argue cogently that early-modern overseas expansion and exploration contributed

significantly to European visual and intellectual culture. Flower pieces and pronk stilleven

(sumptuous still lifes) have been particularly singled out as evidence of the close association

between art, culture, science and early-modern Dutch overseas expansion.17

Flower pieces, as a sub-category of still life, were explained by Norman Bryson in his

1990 study as a reflection upon georgics.18

Virgils poem The Georgics, which celebrated

rural labour and the purity of country life, was popular in the Dutch Republic during the

seventeenth century, where its influence was clearly demonstrated in art, garden design and a

particular genre of poetry called the hofdicht that lauded the gardens of elite country houses.19

Flower pieces, Bryson argues, were a celebration of the cultural intervention required to

convert nature into art. A painting of a flower bouquet, in its final execution, incorporated

intensive stages of labour: exploration (the discovery and transport of exotic flower species),

horticulture (the cultivation of specimens in Europe), botany (the production of texts and

drawings that recorded and disseminated knowledge about these plants), painting (which

required skills and training specific to a guild trade), and connoisseurship (involving a certain

amount of cultural capital on the part of the buyer in order to appreciate all these stages and to

display good taste through admiration of the finished product).20

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Bryson has argued that the visual space that items in Dutch still life compositions

occupied were at once centripetal and distilled. Such paintings represented objects

collected from all corners of the Republics trading empire and concentrated in the sovereign

space of the metropole.21

The authoritative recent work of Hochstrasser extends upon this

premise and draws many other streams of the extant scholarship together. Hochstrasser

combines a Marxist approach with postcolonial theory and symbolic anthropology in her

analysis, and places seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes in a decisively colonial context. She

argues that such images both reflected and constituted the economic and cultural value of the

objects represented in them. Luxury goods like tulips and carpets from the Ottoman world,

porcelain from China, shells and spices from the East Indies, sugar and salt from the West

Indies, silver from Peru, and fruits and wine from the Mediterranean were evidence of a pre-

industrial commodity fetishism at work in the Netherlands that was largely sustained by an

increasingly profitable seaborne empire.22

Hochstrassers analysis supports the revision of

orthodox explanations for the rise of the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century as enabled

by Dutch command over the Baltic trade in bulk items like grain and herring. Following

Jonathan Israel, she argues that the colonial trade in low bulk, high value items imported from

the tropics (like spices) were crucial to generating Dutch wealth.23

Importantly, Hochstrassers work goes beyond Brysons contentions to show that still

lifes did not simply reflect a celebration of georgic labour. Her analysis of the market for still

life paintings in the Netherlands demonstrates that they peaked in popularity and were at their

most valuable during the 1660s, precisely at the time when Dutch colonial trade was at its

most lucrative. Still lifes were overwhelmingly purchased by the very merchant classes who

were directly involved with and profited from the colonial trade.24

Seventeenth century still

lifes thus provided edifying images of the items that were the source of Dutch wealth in the

seventeenth century. Where such images featured overseas trade commodities, they also

7

elided the enormous social costs that were involved to produce them: the coercive labour

systems (slavery and indentured labour) that were enforced overseas, and also the domestic

labour that was exploited to procure these items (the lower orders made up the bulk of

seafaring personnel, and few working-class Dutch people would have been able to afford the

luxuries depicted in most still lifes).25

The conclusions to be drawn from this survey of recent scholarly approaches to

seventeenth-century Dutch still life painting are twofold. First, the fruits of nature especially

those gleaned from colonized, tropical environments were regarded as objects of beauty and

value in seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture. Such items were celebrated as examples of

Dutch supremacy in trade, and as the positive outcomes of expansionary endeavour. Second,

the kind of labour that Dutch cultivators, collectors and traders participated in to procure these

items was given precedence over the coerced, foreign labour that was required to produce

them in the first instance. In combination, the studies of seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes

reviewed here provide a useful set of conceptual tools with which to pursue the chief aim of

this essay, namely, to examine the form and meaning of the genre during the modern era in

the Netherlands Indies, a tropical colony whose commodities were crucial to the wealth of the

Dutch Republic and, later, to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, over a period of three and a

half centuries. In turn, the application of extant approaches to a later historical period and a

specifically colonial (rather than metropolitan) cultural context promises to test and challenge

current interpretations of still life and to open new historical lines of inquiry into the

development of the genre over time and geographical space.

Art in a modern colonial context: The Netherlands Indies

The great age of still life painting and of Dutch overseas expansion may well have been in the

seventeenth century, but both the genre and Dutch colonialism persisted well into the modern

8

era. Indeed, a range of modernists throughout Europe practiced their artistic innovations

through studies in still life, including the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, as well as the

Frenchman Paul Czanne and the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, among others.26

An

investigation of still life in a colonial context would thus seem long overdue. Discussions of

still lifes made in tropical colonies during the nineteenth or twentieth centuries are usually

brief and buried in broader works on famous artists like Paul Gauguin, for instance.27

To my

knowledge, no works to date have examined the practice of still life painting in the Dutch

colonies that remained in the early nineteenth century (all of them tropical): Suriname in

South America, the Netherlands Antilles in the West Indies, and the Netherlands Indies (now

the Republic of Indonesia).

Focusing on still lifes from the Netherlands Indies would seem appropriate, given that

coastal trading settlements in the Indonesian archipelago were among the earliest overseas

possessions to have been acquired by the VOC during the early seventeenth century, and thus

provide an historical link to the Golden Age of Dutch painting and expansion. The Indies

were the source of precious spices in the seventeenth century, a range of lucrative plantation

crops in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (notably sugar, coffee tea and tobacco), and

oil, rubber and minerals in the early twentieth century. The Indies became a Crown colony in

1816. The VOC had been dissolved in 1800 due to financial problems, and responsibility for

its former colonies was assumed by a Dutch state in turmoil. Until 1813, with the accession of

King Willem I to the throne, the Netherlands was effectively a French property as a

consequence of invasion in 1795. Following the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, the

Netherlands lost most of its former overseas possessions to Britain. Thereafter, the

Netherlands Indies was one of the few colonies remaining to the Dutch Crown.

The Indies was a very profitable colony, with Java and Madura exploited to great

effect from the 1830s in a notorious plantation scheme known as the Cultuurstelsel

9

(Cultivation System), implemented to finance the Netherlands recovery following the French

occupation.28

A new conglomerate headed by the king, the Netherlands Trading Company,

managed most of the commerce in plantation goods during the nineteenth century, as

famously critiqued in the novel Max Havelaar (1860) by Multatuli.29

From the 1870s, in

response to liberal reforms in the Netherlands, the Indies was opened to private enterprise and

the Dutch turned their attentions to the Outer Islands, establishing mines and plantations and

conquering new kingdoms along the way. Dutch expansion effectively ceased in 1942, when

the Japanese invaded the Indies during the Pacific War (19411945). The official end came in

1949, when the Netherlands finally recognized the independent Republic of Indonesia after

five years of revolutionary conflict.

Colonial society in the Indies had been heterogeneous since the seventeenth century,

with the majority of Europeans either born in the Indies (creole) and/or descended from

Indo-European parents until well into the twentieth century.30

Despite the fact that Europeans

comprised a tiny minority (less than one per cent) of the total population of the Indies, from

the early nineteenth century onwards the elite culture of colonial society was increasingly

defined with reference to European norms,31

a transition which can also be traced in other

Asian colonies such as British India.32

Painters and photographers in the Indies showed an avid interest in the landscapes and

peoples of the tropics and, although the art market in the colony itself was initially weak,

works were frequently shown to wide audiences in Europe and the Indies during the late

colonial period. During the first half of the nineteenth century, relatively few professional

artists had been permitted entry to the Indies, as authorities favoured those who could be

employed on plantations, in the civil service and the military, or as members of scientific

expeditions.33

These professions each produced many amateur painters whose works were

accessible to relatively small audiences at first, limited to those who either saw original works

10

at first hand or else viewed reproductions of them in printed books and albums. The latter

group was by definition generally restricted to readers literate in European languages, and

with the purchasing power to acquire such volumes.34

In the latter half of the ninteenth

century, the works of Indies dilettantes was also shown at international Colonial Exhibitions

and World Fairs, where they reached a substantially larger audience, often numbering in the

millions.35

Around the same time, a market for painting began to flourish in the Indies,

following the increased movement of peoples between Europe and Asia. The advent of

steamshipping and the introduction of liberal reforms to the Indies economy during the 1870s

stimulated an influx of tourists and travelling artists, as well as private capital. Bali was

perhaps the best-known beneficiary of colonial tourism. By the 1920s, the island had became

a major destination for scholars, artists and wealthy western tourists, and soon developed the

most sophisticated commercial market for painting anywhere in the Indies.36

Gallery

audiences also proliferated with the founding of art circles (kunstkringen) throughout the

Indies during the first decades of the twentieth century.37

These associations staged travelling

exhibitions of local as well as overseas artists for Indies devotees, including not only

Europeans but also Indonesian elites who had developed a taste for western art. Indeed, from

the second half of the nineteenth century onward, a growing number of Asian painters were

being trained in the European academic tradition. The most famous of these was the Javanese

aristocrat Raden Sjarief Bustaman Saleh (18071800), whose works attracted considerable

patronage in Europe and the Indies.38

Photography from the colonies also garnered substantial audiences. The advent of

postcard photography in the late nineteenth century saw the proliferation of cheap, portable,

popular visual souvenirs of the Indies.39

At the same time, commercial studios such as Charles

(& Van Es) & Co, Foto Lux, Kleingrothe, and Woodbury and Page, to name just a few,

proliferated throughout the Indies, fulfilling private commissions and producing lavish

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display albums.40

It was not just Europeans who patronized studios and worked as

photographers. Kassian Cephas (18451912), court photographer to Sultan

Hamengkobuwono VI, became one of the most renowned photographers of the colonial

period.41

Beyond the court, wealthy Chinese and Indonesian families also commissioned

photographs for private purposes.42

The audience for paintings and photographs from the Indies, especially during the late

colonial period, was thus extensive and diverse. Accessibility to Indies art was not confined to

the small European minority who comprised the Indies ruling classes, but also circulated

among Asian Indies elites and was seen by large international audiences in Europe.

Colonial representations of the Indies, particularly in the popular genre of landscape,

frequently elided the negative impact of colonial expansion.43

Conflict and exploitation were

controversial realities of Dutch rule in the tropics, but they did not make for palatable images,

especially when liberalism and ethical rule were official government policy in the Indies

from 1900 onwards. Those artists whose works were popular avoided scenes that might

contradict the fiction of benevolent colonial rule.

Dutch civil servants, missionaries,

archaeologists and amateur enthusiasts regularly demonstrated a committed ethnographic

interest in the diverse arts and material cultures of the Indies. However, traditional European

forms such as painting and relatively new modes of representation like photography continued

to look to the Continent for inspiration. Further, compared to those painters who adhered to

naturalist-realist styles, modernists of any kind tended not to be very successful in the Indies.

Painting as an art form was thus particularly conservative in this Dutch colony.44

The preceding discussion provides the context for the following analysis of still life in

the Indies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The next section demonstrates

the ways in which Dutch colonial still lifes from the Indies differed compositionally from

their early modern predecessors. Still life was largely a photographic genre in the Indies, with

12

relatively few examples existing in painted form. Further, the organization of items in

colonial still lifes drew strongly upon traditions of botanicial illustration, a manner of display

influenced by the popularity of natural history and the culture of collecting in the Indies. The

narrow thematic focus of Indies still lifes on tropical fruits, and the historic significance of

this emphasis, will be examined in the remaining sections.

Indies still lifes, colonial botany and the culture of collecting

Seventeenth century Dutch still life painters almost always arranged food items indoors on a

table, and in manners that suggested pending consumption or an interrupted meal. Banketje

stukken (banquet pieces) or ontbijt (breakfast) scenes were two subcategories of still life that

commonly adhered to this model (figures 1 and 2). In the Indies, by contrast, artists who were

active during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rarely if ever produced still lifes that

evoked the sociality of eating. Instead, they tended to follow the principles of botanical

display, whereby items were laid out with few contextual props and the greatest anatomical

accuracy possible.

Figure 1: Jan Davidsz. de Heem, Sumptuous Still Life with Jewellery Box, c.16501655. Oil on canvas, 94.7 x

120.5 cm. The Hague: Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis.

Figure 2: Floris van Dijk, Still Life with Cheeses, seventeeth century. Oil on panel, 82.2 x 111.2 cm. Amsterdam:

Rijksmuseum.

The conventions of botanical drawing had been evident in Dutch representations of the

Indies since the seventeenth century, as shown in East Indies Market Scene (1640) (figure 3).

This image was formerly attributed to Albert Eckhout, the painter who accompanied Johan

Maurits van Nassau-Siegen to Brazil during his tenure as governor of the West India

13

Company possession.45

Between 1637 and 1644 Eckhout produced a series of ethnographic

portraits of Brazilian peoples, as well as a range of still lifes of indigenous and imported flora,

all arranged outdoors on ledges set against stormy skies and viewed as though from below

(figure 4).46

Eckhout had never been to the Indies, and some scholars have queried whether he

was in fact the artist behind figure 3.47

There are certainly no other known images by Eckhout

in which still life and ethnographic portrait are combined in the form of a market scene

(which, like still life, was a distinct seventeenth-century category of painting).

Figure 3: Artist unknown (attributed to Albert Eckhout), East Indies Market Scene, 1640. Oil on

canvas, 106 x 174.5 cm. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum.

Figure 4: Albert Eckhout, Still Life with Tropical Fruits, c. 1641. Oil on canvas, 91 x 91 cm.

Copenhagen: Nationalmuseet. The National Museum of Denmark, Ethnographic Collection.

Putting aside the issues of provenance and the market scene genre, which are both

outside the scope of interest here, East Indies Market Scene remains one of the earliest known

still lifes from the Indies, and begins a long tradition of showing food items in botanical

modes of display. Illustrated botanical treatises had begun to flourish during the seventeenth

century, in tandem with the expansion of European overseas trading companies and the

proliferation of printed books on natural history.48

Botanical modes of representing flora thus

became entrenched in early-modern visual culture. In the Indies, the same conventions

continued into the modern era. One of the finest examples is Indonesian Fruits (first painted

in 1872) (figure 5) by Jan Danil Beynon (183077), an Indo-European artist based in

Batavia. Beynon was a professional painter with his own studio on the illustrious Molenvliet,

one of the capitals prestigious canals. He had been schooled at the Royal Academy for Art in

Amsterdam between 1848 and 1855 under the tutelage of the renowned Dutch painters

14

Cornelis Kruseman and Nicolaas Pienemann.49

Beynons works, which consisted largely of

Javanese landscape paintings, scenes from rural life, and portraits, were exhibited in the

Netherlands throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, including at the 1883

Amsterdam Colonial Exhibition. The still life reproduced in figure 5 is one of two such

images known to have been painted by him, and is among some of the largest known

examples of the genre from the Indies.50

Beynon displayed the items in a painterly style,

while taking care to follow botanical conventions that emphasize anatomical detail. Colonial

educators clearly appreciated the instructive potential of the picture, as it was reproduced in

poster form for Indies schools in the early decades of the twentieth century.51

Figure 5: Jan Danil Beynon, Indonesian Fruits, before 1945. School poster, 60 x 73 cm. Amsterdam: KIT

Tropenmuseum, inv. no. 4765-96.

(Based on the original painting, 1872, oil on canvas, private collection.)

A smaller painting, Indische Vruchten en Bloemen, made ten years earlier by the

Haarlem-born artist Elisabeth Johanna Stapert-Koning (181687), shows similar botanical

inclinations (figure 6). Stapert-Koning was in many ways a remarkable woman, overcoming

the contraints both of sexism (painting was a profession still dominated by men in the

nineteenth century) and disability (she was born with her right arm significantly shorter than

her left) to achieve modest success as a still life specialist and botanical artist. Elisabeth took

up drawing at an early age under the tutelage of her father, at whose school she was the only

female pupil (she was also the only girl among seven brothers). By the age of nine she had

entered into her first exhibition, and in later years she trained under well known Dutch still

life specialists. During the 1850s she accrued several prestigious commissions, including from

King Willem II.52

The work that she became best known for, however, was the Indies

portfolio of botanical drawings and paintings that she created while on her honeymoon trip to

Java, following her marriage to Sijbrand Stapert in 1859. Her interest in the flora and fauna of

15

the Netherlands Indies had been formally registered two decades earlier: in 1839 she became

the first female member of the Natuurkundige Vereeniging in Nederlandsch Indi (Natural

History Society in the Netherlands Indies).53

While few of her colonial works were exhibited

during Stapert-Konings lifetime, they became renowned after her death, largely due to the

promotional efforts of her step-daughter. In 1919, in honour of the three hundred year

anniversary of the founding of Batavia, her Indies works were exhibited at the Stedelijk

Museum in Amsterdam.54

Figure 6: E.J. Stapert-Koning, Indische Vruchten en Bloemen, 1862. Oil on canvas, 49 x 63.5 cm. Amsterdam:

KIT Tropenmusem, inv. no. 2983-1.

Stapert-Konings painting combines botanical conventions for the display of fruits and

flowers with painterly traditions for showing tropical contexts that can be traced back to

Eckhout in Brazil. Indische Vruchten en Bloemen, now on permanent exhibition at the

Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, shows a landscape with palm trees in the distance at the right

of the painting which clearly situates the still life in the tropics. The image also has much in

common with Beynons later painting. Both still lifes show tropical fruits arranged outdoors,

at the foot of a tree, and display their exteriors (the spiny skins of rambutan) as well as their

internal structures (segmented citruses, melons and mangosteens) through bisection. Stapert-

Konings inclusion of tropical flowers, however, is very rare (although frangipanis are in fact

native to South and Central America, not to Indonesia), a detail that will be returned to

shortly.

As well as being the favoured convention of painters, botanic modes of representation

were also followed in a wide range of still lifes produced by Indies studio photographers

during the late nineteenth century. Photographic processes were applied in the Indies soon

after the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839. Archaeologists and surveyors in particular

16

quickly perceived the advantages of photographs as visual documents,55

and in later decades

the colonial government, business, and anthropologists and ethnographers followed suit.56

By

the 1870s, private commercial studios producing commissioned works (and later, postcards)

were also beginning to proliferate in the Indies.57

The most prominent of these was the studio

of Woodbury and Page, which eventually boasted multiple offices across the archipelago. The

studio was founded in 1857 by two Englishmen who had met on the goldfields of the

Australian colony of Victoria, and who discovered that photography was a steadier venture

than gold panning.58

Woodbury and Page produced a series of still life photos between the

1860s and 1880s, many of them in arrangements that evoked the display of botanical

specimens (figure 7). Some were included in costly souvenir albums, while others seem to

have been sold as cheaper, single pieces.59

Figure 7: Woodbury & Page, Still Life, 1880. Albumin print, 24.5 x 18.5 cm. Leiden: KITLV Special

Collections, inv. no. 3148.

Aside from commercial studies, freelance photographers and amateurs were also

drawn to the still life genre. In 1865 Isidore van Kinsbergen, an accomplished photographer,

set designer and archaeologist, produced a photograph of Indies fruits piled before a wicker

screen hung with game birds (figure 8) (game had also been a distinctive sub-genre of

seventeenth century still life paintings).60

Numerous still lifes made by lesser-known Indies

photographers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exist in colonial

archives.61

Occasionally, still lifes of tropical fruits and flowers even appear in family albums.

The unknown photographer who made the image reproduced in figure 9 evidently regarded

still life as a test of his62

artistry and skill, and perhaps deliberately chose his items bananas,

limes and orchids for their evocation of the tropical Indies. His imitation of painterly

arrangements in preference to the more common botanical style is unusual in Indies

17

vernacular or professional photography.

Figure 8: Isidore van Kinsbergen, Fruits, Game and Fowl in Batavia, 1865. Albumin print, 26.5 x 23.5 cm.

Leiden: KITLV Special Collections, inv. no. 26590.

Figure 9: Photographer unknown, Opname bij Lamplicht, Kendangan, 15 March 1918. Photograph with original

backing, 11 x 8 cm. Leiden: KITLV Special Collections, Album 478.

Colonial still lifes were perhaps produced so often in botanical modes because of the

enduring popularity of natural history and collecting in the Netherlands Indies during the

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Botanical drawing and collecting flourished during

this period partly because the colonial frontier was expanding most rapidly between 1870 and

1942.63

As Beth Fowkes Tobin has cogently argued, collecting was also a practice that

represented exotic nature in fragments, as objects that could be removed from their original

cultural, ecological and economic contexts, stripped of their functions, reordered, and

recontextualized within a system of European cultural meanings.64

As well as communicating

European scientific expertise and mastery over natural resources, colonial collections of

plants and objects gleaned from unfamiliar landscapes signalled elite status among those who

had the time, money, education and social networks to indulge such interests.65

In the Indies during the colonial period, collecting was similarly regarded as a genteel

pursuit. In the early nineteenth century, several high-ranking Dutch officials in the colonial

bureaucracy were known to have maintained collections of shells and botanical samples,

among them Nicolaas Engelhard, Governor of Javas North Coast (r. 180108), and

Governor-General G.A.G.Ph. Baron van der Capellen (r. 181626), sponsor of the Reinwardt

expeditions in the 1820s.66

Photographic records suggest that governing elites continued to

maintain similar collections at the end of the nineteenth century.67

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Botany also held broad appeal beyond governing circles. Many of the European

painters who worked on Bali during the 1920s and 1930s pursued an amateur interest in

botanical drawing, among them W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp (18741950), Willem Hofker (1902

81) and Walter Spies (18951942).68

Further, historical figures like Georg Everhard

Rumphius (c.16271702), a German botanist who had worked for the VOC on Ambon during

the seventeenth century, continued to be held in high esteem among Dutch colonists well into

the twentieth century. As a comment on the historical legacy of Rumphius in Dutch colonial

culture, the Tropenmuseum (formerly the Colonial Institute) in Amsterdam currently displays

a wax replica of the botanist in a room-sized curiosity cabinet as part of its permanent

exhibition of the Netherlands Indies. Indeed, Rumphius major illustrated treatises

DAmboinsche Rariteitkamer (1705) (The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet) and Het Amboinsch

Kruidboek (1697) (The Ambonese Herbal) found their way into a popular colonial novel by

Maria Dermot entitled De Tienduizen Dingen (The Ten Thousand Things) (1955), in which

these texts played a crucial role in historicizing Dutch contact with Ambon.69

Rumphius

house on the island was carefully preserved as a memorial to Dutch colonial history in the

region. The visit of Governor-General J.P. van Limburg Stirum and his wife to the official

Rumphius monument on the island in 1919 was a well documented component of his official

tour that year (figure 10). Exhibitions of rariteiten (curiosity collections) of the kind that

Rumphius might have assembled in the course of his own work continued to be staged on

Ambon during the early twentieth century.70

Botanical drawing and collecting were thus

popular pursuits among Europeans in the colonial Indies. Still life images that followed

scientific conventions of display (rather than painterly modes of depiction that conjured meal

tables and consumption) may therefore have appealed directly to local tastes.

Figure 10: Photographer unknown, Governor-General J.P. van Limburg Stirum and his wife, C.M.R. van

Limburg Stirum-van Sminia at the Rumphius Monument, October 1919. Photograph, 9 x 11 cm. Leiden: KITLV

Special Collections, inv. no. 33680.

19

That still lifes were particularly popular as a photographic genre more so than

paintings can also be explained with reference to the unique visual culture of the nineteenth

century. It was perhaps the stillness of a still life that appealed to photographers, whose

success in the infancy of the technology, when movement tainted exposures with blurs and

streaks, depended on immobile subjects. However, still life photography persisted well

beyond late nineteenth-century innovations like rapid shutter speeds and portable cameras,

both of which allowed for a wider variety of subjects to be captured. There was also

something about the perception of photography as an image-making process in the nineteenth

century that may have disposed practitioners and audiences toward botanical conventions of

display in still life images. The fact that photography involved chemical and mechanical

processes meant that nineteenth-century audiences frequently received photographs not so

much as art in the same way that they would paintings, but rather as reportage.71

Botanical

conventions of display may thus have seemed more appropriate for a mode of representation

that was considered to be closer to science than to art.

Indeed, still life was very much a photographic genre in the Indies. Beynon and

Stapert-Koning were among only a handful of Indies painters who dabbled in the genre, and

very few of the colonial modernists who were active during the early decades of the twentieth

century were interested in still life. Most of the painters who had trained in Europe and found

success in the Indies such as W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp, Johannes ten Klooster (18731940),

Isaac Israls (18651934), Rudolf Bonnet (18951978), and Walter Spies avoided still life

altogether. Adrien Jean le Mayeur de Merprs (18801958), the Belgian painter who became

renowned for his idyllic images of Balinese women in tropical garden settings, painted a

single known still life in Europe in 1924, and then abandoned the subject for the remainder of

his life.72

Dolf Breetvelt (18921975), a Dutch artist who experimented with surrealism in the

1930s and later turned to abstract forms in the 1950s, painted only one still life with food

20

items (1939) in the Indies.73

Charles Sayers (190143) was perhaps the most prolific still life

artist in the Indies. Along with an interest in Balinese or Javanese wayang golek (wooden

puppet theatre) that he evidently shared with Breetvelt, Sayers works also ranged beyond the

limited interests of most other artists to include traditional genres like vanitas still lifes (figure

11) and flower pieces.74

Figure 11: Charles Sayers, Still Life with Violin and Skull, 1936. Oil on cotton, 76 x 67 cm. Amsterdam: KIT

Tropenmuseum, inv. no. 1936-13.

Sayers was exceptional in more ways than one. Not only did he take to still life with

an enthusiasm that was rare among European painters in the Indies, most of whom preferred

landscapes and village scenes, he also explored subjects that few artists considered when they

did try their hand at still life. His interest in flower pieces was unusually rare in Indies visual

culture, for the vast majority of painters and photographers (with the notable exception of

Stapert-Koning) focused almost exclusively on tropical fruits. In content as well as in form,

therefore, Indies still lifes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries differed substantially from

their seventeenth-century predecessors. The implications for the meaning of still lifes in the

context of Dutch colonial visual culture are explored in the next section, against an

explication of the historical circumstances that help account for the change in still life

iconography over time and in the particular context of the Netherlands Indies.

Tropical fruits and colonial trade

Apart from an interest among some modernist painters in theatre masks, few themes other

than tropical fruits appeared in colonial still lifes from the Netherlands Indies. European fruits

like grapes, plums, peaches and berries, together with citruses such as lemons and oranges,

had been of great interest to Golden Age still life painters (see figures 1 and 2). Many of these

21

items were considered luxuries in the early modern era, either because of their limited

seasonal availability or because they were imported from the Mediterranean. However, such

commestibles were more likely to be available to wealthy merchants with a disposable

income than to ordinary Dutch workers and farmers, who relied either on what they could

produce themselves or what their modest wages could purchase locally. This remained true

for most of the population of the Netherlands until well into the nineteenth century.75

For modern audiences in the Netherlands, fresh tropical fruits like pineapples, mangos,

durian and rambutan would have seemed a luxury as they were beyond the means of average

householders even in the early twentieth century, after the invention of canning, refrigeration

and other preserving techniques.76

In this respect, tropical still lifes depicted items that would

have been almost as exotic to the experiences of ordinary people in the Netherlands in the

modern period as the costly imported spices and Chinese porcelain in Golden Age still lifes

would have seemed to most Dutch people in the seventeenth century. However, for Indies

residents tropical fruits were a commonplace that were grown in the gardens of many colonial

households or produced by indigenous smallholders, and were widely and cheaply available

in local markets run by Asian vendors.77

Where seventeenth-century still lifes had featured valuable international trade

commodities, Indies still lifes from the modern period therefore depicted items that circulated

in the local subsistence economy. Tropical fruits may well have been regularly consumed by

Indies families, but they were not a substantial part of the capitalist export economy and thus

did not generate a significant proportion of the Indies wealth. For the duration of the colonial

period, plantations of export crops like sugar, coffee and tobacco constituted the most

important sector of the Netherlands Indies economy.78

The commercial value of such crops

was frequently recognized in other visual media, such as displays dedicated to Indies industry

at international colonial exhibitions, souvenir photographs of Javanese tea-pickers created for

22

the European market, and commemorative albums for plantation executives.79

However, it

was rare for images of plantations to appear in high art forms like painting, where idyllic

scenes of rural subsistence labour were preferred to images of proto-industrial agricultural

complexes of the variety that had begun to proliferate in the Indies from the mid-nineteenth

century onwards.80

Still life, too, conjured high art and traditional ways of seeing long

entrenched in Dutch visual culture, and apart from the occasional cluster of coffee beans in

images like those by Beynon (figure 5) avoided reference to the same sources of colonial

wealth that landscape artists regularly omitted.

Why were plantation products generally absent from Indies still lifes in the modern

era, when such items were clearly the raison dtre of Dutch colonialism in the tropics? An

historical explanation must begin with the rise of liberal reforms to Dutch governance in the

Indies during the late nineteenth century. Dutch progressives had been increasingly critical of

the most overtly exploitative aspects of colonialism in the Netherlands Indies, particularly

schemes like the cultivation system, which forced peasant households on Java and Madura to

devote a proportion of their land and labour to growing cash crops for export. In 1870, liberal

reforms were enacted in the Indies that saw the economy opened to private enterprise.

Further, in 1900, the Dutch Crown nominally recognised its debt of honour to the ordinary

people of the Indies who had generated prosperity for the Netherlands. In that year Queen

Wilhelmina launched what became known as the Ethical Policy, which advocated the

improvement of Native welfare. The reform process was riddled with inconsistencies and

ironies,81

perhaps the most striking of which was that the policy straddled the most

belligerent period in modern Dutch colonial history: between 1870 and 1910 the Netherlands

launched some thirty subjugation campaigns to expand its sovereignty in the Indies.82

The

rhetoric of liberalism and ethical rule thus masked the reality of violent colonial expansion,

which included the opening of new lands in the Outer Islands to plantation agriculture. In

23

regions like East Sumatra, all such estates were worked by indentured labourers recruited

from southern China or Java whose contracts were enforced by penal sanctions.83

As Hochstrasser has contended, seventeenth-century still lifes of imported luxuries

elided the social costs of producing such goods. Nineteenth-century painters and

photographers in the Indies arguably achieved the same effect more comprehensively by

excluding plantation products altogether from still life images. However, an important

component of Hochstrassers study is her concession that few consumers in the early modern

era would have been fully aware of the brutal means by which Dutch companies procured

trade items.84

Not so for the late nineteenth century, when technologies like photography and

modern print cultures circulated news of exploitation and atrocity more effectively than ever

before (despite periods of press censorship in the Indies). Unlike the merchants who

purchased still life paintings in the seventeenth century, modern viewers in the Netherlands

and the Indies were keenly aware of the scandals of empire. Indeed, these were publicized in

the mid-nineteenth century by famous protest novels like Multatulis Max Havelaar, which

contributed to the abolition of the cultivation system.85

Similarly, in the early twentieth

century, labour conditions on Outer Islands plantations were publicly deplored by a small but

increasingly vociferous minority of European observers who called for reform.86

Plantation products and the means by which they were acquired were thus more

controversial in the late modern period than they had been in previous centuries. Early-

modern painters may have celebrated the expansion of Dutch trade abroad through

sumptuous still lifes, but in the late modern period it was no longer politic for artists whose

success depended on popular appeal to glorify colonial trade and promote images that were

redolant of scandal. Tropical fruits produced outside the sphere of colonial capitalism were a

far more pleasant prospect.

24

The absence of flower pieces in Indies still lifes

Among the range of Golden Age categories of still lifes that colonial painters and

photographers ignored in their overwhelming focus on fruits is one popular and important

sub-genre: the flower piece. In the early seventeenth century, painters like Jan Brueghel the

Elder, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (figure 12) and Jacob de Gheyn, to mention just a few

of the best known painters, specialized in portraits of bouquets of exotic and costly flowers.

Flower pieces remained popular among European painters (including modernists) until the

early twentieth century. In the Netherlands Indies, by contrast, the number of well known

artists to have produced such images can be counted on one hand. Sayers numerous

examples constitute an exception, but even these paintings were of flowers that were not

particularly associated with the tropics. Most other colonial painters, if they produced flower

pieces at all, tended to do so during those parts of their careers that were spent in Europe,

before or after a sojourn in the Indies. Hendrik Paulides (18921967), a renowned artist who

was commissioned in the 1950s by the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam to produce several

murals for the new building (now the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, or KIT), produced

one known flower piece in 1914, before he went to the Indies.87

Willem Hofker, a painter who

specialized in scenes from Balinese life, avoided still lifes until he was back in Europe

following Indonesian independence; he produced one flower piece in Amsterdam in 1952.88

Commercial photographic studios regularly included palm fronds and sprays of flowers in

their still lifes of Indies fruits (see figure 7), but none made flower portraits of the kind

comparable to Golden Age paintings. E.J. Stapert-Konings frangipanis (figure 6), and the

unknown amateur photographer who produced a still life with orchids (figure 9), a flower

strongly associated with the Indies, were rarities.89

Figure 12: Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Vase with Flowers in a Window, c. 1618. Oil on panel, 64 x 46 cm.

The Hague: Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis.

25

Given the popularity of orchids among European collectors in the modern era, and

their strong association with the tropics (particularly the Indies, which has many indigenous

species of orchid), it is surprising that more painters and photographers did not exploit this

subject in still lifes. Orchids were featured in botanical drawings and photographs from the

Indies,90

and were popular among visitors to the Botanic Garden at Buitenzorg (now Bogor,

where orchids continue to feature prominently as tourist attractions).91

Why were orchids in particular and tropical flowers in general largely absent from

colonial still lifes? Was their omission a reflection of cultural practices in the Indies? Among

Indies Muslims, flowers were cultivated in royal gardens intended to replicate paradise.92

Unlike other parts of the Muslim world, where naturalistic depiction of living things was

often forbidden, in Java during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Hindu-Buddhist

conventions for representing flowers were retained in the form of batik motifs.93

Chinese

batik designs from the Indies also demonstrate a continuing appreciation for traditional

flowers like the chrysanthemum and lotus.94

Among the Indo-Chinese community, potted

plants and flowers (an important feature of traditional Chinese gardens) remained in evidence

and were also widely adopted in European gardens.95

Finally, garlands and flower heads

continue to serve important functions in Hindu worship on Bali.96

Among the Asian

population in the Indies, then, there were clearly rich traditions for using and representing

flowers in religious and secular life in certain forms. However, the display of cut flowers in

vases for ornamental purposes was certainly not widespread among Asians in the Indies

during the nineteenth century, and there was no visual tradition in Indonesian art forms that

compared to the Dutch still life.

Could local cultural practices have curtailed European uses and representations of

flowers in the Indies? It would seem not. Colonial family photographs demonstrate that

26

Europeans continued to display cut flowers in their homes. The fourteen albums dating from

the 1920s that belonged to Max Foltynski Jr, born in Batavia in 1897 to a Polish army officer

and a Dutch housewife, provide a particularly well preserved case in point.97

One album

shows Max and his wife, Petronella, in a series of formal poses, including a scene with a

flower bouquet (figure 13). The albums also demonstrate that bouquets were important (and

profuse) decorations at European weddings (figure 14), as well as at funerals, departures,

anniversaries and other momentous social gatherings and celebrations, as corroborated in

numerous family collections from the period.98

The display of cut flowers was thus clearly a

thriving practice among Europeans in the Netherlands Indies, one that had not been

constrained by Indonesian customs. However, the photographs that show the uses of flowers

among Europeans in the Indies focus on the occasion and its locus, and do not make portraits

of bouquets in the manner of a still life. Further, colonial photographs of flower decorations

emphasize abundance, rather than the dazzling variety of species that had been the hallmark

of seventeenth-century still lifes.99

Indeed, abundance is key to understanding the

iconography of still life images in the Netherlands Indies during the modern era.

Figure 13: Unknown photographer, Max Foltynski Jr and Petronella Johanna Antoinetta Foltynski-Peeters in

Bandung, 3 July 1921. Photograph, 12.5 x 16 cm. Leiden: KITLV Special Collections, Album 243, inv. no.

13074.

Figure 14: Unknown photographer, Unknown bridal couple, Bandung, 8 August 1921. Photograph, 12 x 16.5

cm. Leiden: KITLV Special Collections, Album 243, inv. no. 13076.

Colonial still lifes and European discourses of tropical abundance

Pleasure in seventeenth century Dutch still lifes, Norman Bryson has written, is disavowed,

hidden by production; what replaces it is strain, effort and the work imperative.100

Similarly,

anthropologist Jack Goody has argued that flower still lifes emphasize the surplus offered

27

by a developed system of production that permits flowers to flourish.101

Given the

compelling case made by scholars for the importance of flower pieces as celebrations of

georgic themes in early-modern Dutch visual culture, it would seem that the focus on fruits

and the absence of flower pieces in colonial still lifes signifies a substantial shift in the

iconography of the genre as it developed in the Indies during the modern era. Perhaps flowers

remained too strongly coupled with Dutchness among European artists in the Indies, an

association that they wished to abandon in preference for more overtly tropical and Asian

themes. Fruits, as argued in the previous section, were evocative of tropicality yet devoid of

controversy. Fruits were food items produced for local consumption, not for export, and thus

did not reflect on the true sources of colonial wealth in the Indies (plantation crops) nor on the

Asian labourers who reared them (many of them unfree workers). Still lifes of fruits therefore

symbolized the tropical Indies in forms that conjured high art traditions, but without

canvassing the broader range of meanings that Golden Age painters had glossed, and

completely eliding the pursuit of lucre that Dutch colonialism remained founded upon in the

modern era.

Europeans who journeyed to Southeast Asia between the seventeenth and nineteenth

centuries frequently commented on the exuberance of tropical nature, and the apparent ease

with which the earth seemed to be made productive.102

Natives of Asia, it was argued, were

spoiled by the abundance of the tropics and had no incentive to developed sophisticated

agricultural systems and, by extension, modern societies. Europeans, by contrast, were

accustomed to a harsher climate that required industry and innovation in order to be made

fruitful, which in turn propelled Europeans to higher stages of civilization. In order for the

tropics to attain the same level of development, proponents of such arguments maintained,

they would have to be subjected to European colonial rule.103

The need for European intervention in Asian economies was thus justified with

28

reference to environmentally deterministic models of civilization, where differences between

societies were explained with reference to climate and geography.104

Such paradigms were

complemented by stadial theories, which were especially influential throughout the British

empire,105

but were also given visual form and cultural substance by idyllic Dutch paintings

of rural landscapes in the Indies, and by colonial still lifes that featured tropical fruits. Stadial

models of development placed human societies along a continuum between barbarity and

civilization according to the primary means of their production. Commercial societies like

those of western Europe ranked at the apex of this economic hierarchy. The lower tiers were

occupied by hunter-gatherer and pastoral communities. Colonial intellectuals rarely conceded

that non-European societies might attain civilization within the theoretical possibilities of the

paradigm, tending instead to characterize a broad range of indigenous societies as incapable

of improvement without European tutelage.

Europeans, in both stadial and environmentally deterministic theories of civilizational

difference, were more inclined by nature to commerce and industry. Thus Europeans were

well positioned to instruct Southeast Asian peasants in the necessities of discipline and vigor

required for a flourishing export sector. That local farmers were not disposed to being

diverted from their own lands and labours in the interests of colonial plantation agriculture

was routinely dismissed by colonial scholars and administrators as evidence of the indolence

nurtured by a generous climate. Asian slavery and its successor, indentured labour, were

frequently justified by Europeans on these grounds. The transmigrations of Javanese and

Chinese labourers in the Netherlands Indies were ideologically supported by European

colonists by allusion to discourses of tropical indolence (whereby workers that would not co-

operate must be compelled) until well into the twentieth century.106

It would seem improbable to argue that all European painters and photographers who

produced still lifes of tropical fruits in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had stadial

29

theories and environmentally deterministic paradigms of difference at the forefront of their

minds when they reached for their palettes or cameras. However, discourses of tropical

abundance were deeply embedded in Dutch (and more broadly, European) colonial culture

during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such discourses informed official labour

policies in the Indies, and were also evident in visual genres such as landscape painting. That

the aesthetic delights of Indies fruits may have been enhanced for artists and, crucially, for

paying audiences by their symbolic resonance with contemporary attitudes to the tropics is

thus not beyond the realm of possibility.

Conclusions

The visual culture of the Indies during the modern era was complex and contradictory, with

critiques of colonial excess existing alongside triumphalist discourses of expansion. Although

less popular among European artists and audiences than other genres like landscapes and

ethnographic scenes, which highlighted the difference and diversity of the Netherlands Indies

in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, still life paintings were a small but important

component of the Indies rich visual culture. The particular place of still lifes in that context

was perhaps as a striking and exotic visual souvenir of the tropics, one that drew upon

conventions associated with a Golden Age of Dutch art, culture and overseas expansion.

The composition of modern colonial still lifes was superficially similar to seventeenth

century antecedents. However, the enduring focus on botanical modes of representation,

rather than on scenes that conjured the sociality of eating, distinguished Indies still lifes from

a more diverse early modern genre of art. The culture of collecting among European elites in

the Indies provides the historical framework for these stylistic differences. Indies still lifes

also serve as a window into a late modern period during which the realities of Dutch colonial

expansion and exploitation were increasingly in tension with the official rhetoric of

30

benevolent rule and the visual culture of sanitized agricultural extraction. The nexus between

profit and beauty that had been celebrated in seventeenth century still lifes of luxury imports

was broken in the second half of the nineteenth century, when evidence of the continuing

brutality of colonial trade made the glorification of plantation crops increasingly difficult to

sustain. Indies still lifes thus fostered an image of tropicality that did not challenge the

premise of ethical Dutch rule in an age of accelerated expansion.

The moral, discursive component to still lifes that scholars have identified in Golden

Age examples are thus altered, not absent, in colonial images. As Simon Schama has pointed

out, the embarrassment of riches in seventeenth century Dutch culture resided in the notion of

overvloed (excess) that trade wealth encouraged, resulting in a morally ambivalent visual

culture that celebrated both surfeit and restraint.107

Golden Age painters celebrated the work

of Dutch traders and merchants in procuring luxury items for seventeenth century tables,

omitting the less noble labour of coercing Asian workers to produce these goods in the first

instance. Colonial still lifes in the modern era averted viewers gazes from the fruits of

exploited workers altogether, focusing on subsistence goods rather than plantation crops, and

conjuring a moral universe where abundance was natural, not laboured.

Susie Protschky

Monash University

31

Endnotes

Acknowledgements: Research for this essay was funded by a University of Western Australia

Research Development Award (UWA RDA) in 2009. I am most grateful for the help of my

(then) research assistant, Dr Cecilia Leong-Salobir. I am also indebted to the staff of the

Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT), Amsterdam, and to Liesbeth Ouwehand at the

Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV), Leiden, for their archival

assistance. Finally, thanks to the anonymous Reviewers at Art History, as well as the

numerous colleagues who provided constructive criticism on earlier versions of this essay,

including participants in: The XVIIth Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association of

European Historians (AAEH), Flinders University, Adelaide (Australia), July 2009; The

History Public Lecture Series, University of Western Australia, Perth (Australia), August

2009; and the Monash University History Research Group, Melbourne (Australia) 2010.

1 See, for example, Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age,

New Haven and London, 2007; Donna R. Barnes and Peter G. Rose, eds, Matters of Taste:

Food and Drink in Seventeenth Century Dutch Art and Life, Albany, N.Y., 2002. See also

Celeste Brusati, Natural artifice and material values in Dutch still life in Wayne Franits, ed.,

Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered, Cambridge, 1997;

Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting, Cambridge,

Mass., 1990.

2 Studies that analyze the relationship of still lifes to imperial cultures and economies in the

seventeenth century include Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 105, 128; Hanneke

Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of Perspective: Realism and Illusionism in Seventeenth-Century

Dutch Still-Life Painting, Chicago and London, 2005, 1516; Hochstrasser, Still Life and

Trade. The only significant departure from Eurocentric foci in current still life research is the

32

recent work of Buvelot and Brienen on Albert Eckhout, a painter who was active in Dutch

Brazil during the mid-seventeenth century: Quentin Buvelot, Albert Eckhout: A Dutch Artist

in Brazil, The Hague and Zwolle, 2004; Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise:

Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil, Amsterdam, 2006. I know of no

dedicated studies that examine still lifes in a modern Dutch colonial context.

3 Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, Chicago,

1983.

4 David Arnold, Inventing tropicality in The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and

European Expansion, Oxford, 1996, 14168; David Arnold, Indias place in the tropical

world, 17701930, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 26, 1998,121 at

26; David Arnold, Illusory riches: Representations of the tropical world, 18401950,

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, vol. 21, no. 1, 2000, 618 at 67; David Arnold,

The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science 18001856, Delhi, 2005,

10, 231. See also the essays in Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, eds, Tropical Visions in an

Age of Empire, Chicago and London, 2005, especially Felix Driver and Luciana Martins,

Views and visions of the tropical world, 322 at 45, and Denis Cosgrove, Tropic and

tropicality, 197216.

5 Roland Barthes, The world as object in Critical Essays, Evanston, 1972, 6, 7; Brusati,

Natural artifice and material values, 144; Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade.

6 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the

Golden Age, London, 1991 [First published 1987].

7 Susie Protschky, Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial

Indonesia, Leiden, forthcoming.

8 Guido M.C. Jansen, On the lowest level: The status of still life in Netherlandish art

literature of the seventeenth century in Alan Chong and Wouter Kloeck, eds, Still-Life

33

Paintings from the Netherlands 15501720, Amsterdam and Zwolle, 1999, 518; Margit

Rowell, Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life, New York, 1997, 13.

9 Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 1, 5, 16, 119. Some scholars disagree with Hochstrasser

on the presence of narrative in still lifes: see Marc Eli Blanchard, On still life, Yale French

Studies, vol. 61, 1981, 27698; Gian Casper Bott, Still Life, Kln, 2008.

10 Erwin Panofksy, Reality and symbol in early Flemish paining: Spiritualia sub metaphoris

corporalium in Early Netherlandish Painting, its Origins and Character, Cambridge,

Mass., 1958, vol. 1, 13348; Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the

Art of the Renaissance, Oxford, 1939; Eddy de Jongh, The interpretation of still life

paintings: Possibilities and limits in Questions of Meaning: Theme and Motif in Dutch

Seventeenth Century Painting, Leiden, 2000, 12948; Eddy de Jong, The iconological

approach to seventeenth century Dutch painting in Frans Grijzenhout and Henk van Veen,

eds, The Golden Age of Dutch Painting in Historical Perspective, Cambridge, 1999, 20023

11 Schama, Embarrassment of Riches.

12 De Jongh, The interpretation of still life paintings, 130, 132.

13 Hochstrasser, Symbolic anthropology in Still Life and Trade, 25164. Hochstrassers

conclusions that seventeenth-century still lifes celebrated trade contradict those of

traditional iconologists who argue that such images warned against excess. Further, her

emphasis on the material and cultural value of still life items is at odds with the contention of

scholars like De Jongh when he argues that the so-called realism of seventeenth century

Dutch art is perhaps more characteristic of the mentality of the age than the life of the time:

Eddy de Jongh, Realism and seeming realism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting in

Wayne Franits, ed., Looking at Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art: Realism Reconsidered,

Cambridge, 1997, 21.

34

14

See, for example, W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago and London, 1994, 1124;

W.J.T. Mitchell, Interdisciplinarity and visual culture, The Art Bulletin, vol. 77, no. 4, 1995,

5404; Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images, Cambridge,

Mass., 1996, 5.

15 Alpers, Art of Describing; Svetlana Alpers et al., Visual culture questionnaire, October,

vol. 77, 1996, 2570.

16 Alpers, Art of Describing, 27, 32, 367.

17 Brusati, Natural artifice and material values, 146; Grootenboer, The Rhetoric of

Perspective,1516.

18 Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked.

19 Erik de Jong, For profit and ornament: The function and meaning of Dutch garden art in

the period of William and Mary, 16501702 in John Dixon Hunt, ed., The Dutch Garden in

the Seventeenth Century, Washington, D.C., 1990, 1618, 23; Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch:

How England Plundered Hollands Glory, New York, 2008, 21317.

20 Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 1046, 108.

20 Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 105.

22 Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade. See also Julie Berger Hochstrasser, The conquest of

spice and the Dutch colonial imaginery: Seen and unseen in the visual culture of trade in

Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds, Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and

Politics in the Early Modern World, Philadelphia, 2007, 169.

23 Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 99100; Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade,

15801740, Oxford, 1989, 50, 64, 67, 259, 408, 410, 414.

24 Hochstrasser, The conquest of spice, 169.

25 Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade, 240, 2489, 270.

26 Bott, Still Life, 6481.

35

27

See, for example, the commentary on Gauguins Tahitian still lifes in George T.M.

Shackelford and Claire Frches-Thory, eds, Gauguin Tahiti, Boston, 2004, 201.

28 M.C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200, Basingstoke, 2001, 15560.

29 Multatuli, Max Havelaar of de Koffie Veilingen der Nerderlandsche Handelmaatschappij,

Amsterdam, 1860. In English: Multatuli, Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch

Trading Company, London, 1987.

30 Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, Being Dutch in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and

Empire, 15001920, Athens, Oh., 2008; Gijs Kruijtzer, European migration in the Dutch

sphere in Geert Oostindie, ed., Dutch Colonialism, Migration and Cultural Heritage, Leiden,

2008, 1367.

31 Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia,

Madison, Wis., 1983; Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and

the Intimate in Colonal Rule, Berkeley, Cal., 2002.

32 E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies; The Physical Experience of the Raj, c. 18001947,

Cambridge, 2001, 7, 378, 501, 54, 601, 74, 115; Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in

Colonial India, Cambridge, 2006, 105, 110, 128.

33 The notable exceptions are Antoine Payen and Hubertus Nicolaas Sieburgh. Payen was the

official government painter of the Indies, and Sieburgh was given special permission by King

Willem I to paint in the colony: Marie-Odette Scalliet, Back to nature in the East Indies in

Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures

from the Tropics: Paintings by Western Artists During the Dutch Colonial Period in

Indonesia, Amsterdam, 1999, 65, 67.

34 John Bastin and Bea Brommer, Nineteenth Century Prints and Illustrated Books of

Indonesia, Utrecht, 1979.

36

35

Marieke Bloembergen, Colonial Spectacles: The Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies at

the World Exhibitions, 18801931, Singapore, 2006, 205, 235, 300; Laetitia Dujardin, Ethnics

and Trade: Photography and the Colonial Exhibitions in Amsterdam, Antwerp and Brussels,

Amsterdam, 2007.

36 Jean Couteau, Museum Puri Lukisan, Ubud, 1999, 30.

37 Koos van Brakel, For evidently, the fine arts do not thrive in the Indies: The artistic

climate in the Dutch East Indies in the first half of the twentieth century in Marie-Odette

Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten Kate, Pictures From the

Tropics: Paintings by Western Artists During the Dutch Colonial Period in Indonesia,

Amsterdam, 1999, 1034.

38 Marie-Odette Scalliet, Raden Saleh et les Hollondais: Artiste protg ou otage politique?,

Archipel, vol. 69, 2005, 151258.

39 Leo Haks and Steve Wachlin, Indonesia: 500 Early Postcards, Singapore, 2004, 24.

40 Museum Volkenkunde, Toekang Potret: 100 Years of Photography in the Dutch Indies

18391939, Leiden, 1989, 53120.

41 Gerrit Knaap, Cephas, Yogyakarta: Photography in the Service of the Sultan, Leiden, 1999.

42 Susie Protschky, Seductive landscapes: Gender and European representations of nature in

the Dutch East Indies in the late colonial period, Gender & History, vol. 20, no. 2, 2008,

37298 at 378.

43 Protschky, Images of the Tropics.

44 Protschky, Images of the Tropics; Van Brakel, For evidently, the fine arts do not thrive in

the Indies, 103.

45 Brazil was a Dutch West India Company (WIC) possession from 1630 to 1654. Johan

Maurits was Governor of the colony between 1637 and 1644. For recent scholarly works on

Eckhouts paintings, see Buvelot, Albert Eckhout; Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise.

37

46

Brienen has suggested that Eckhouts still lifes were made to be hung above his

ethnographic portraits, which were larger than life-size: Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise,

1823. See also John Loughman, The market for Netherlandish still lifes, 16001720in Alan

Chong and Wouter Kloek, eds, Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 15501720,

Amsterdam and Zwolle, 1999, 96.

47 The Rijksmuseum, which holds the painting, continues to attribute it to Eckhout: see

http://www.rijksmuseum.nl/collectie/zoeken/asset.jsp?id=SK-A-4070&lang=en. However,

some historians have recently questioned this attribution: Zandvliet, Dutch Encounter with

Asia, 184; Marie-Odette Scalliet, The East India Company: European painters in the

Netherlands East Indies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Marie-Odette Scalliet,

Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeanette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics:

Paintings by Western Artists during the Dutch Colonial Period in Indonesia, Amsterdam,

1999, 17, fn 5.

48 Beth Fowkes Tobin, Domesticating the tropics: Tropical flowers, botanical books, and the

culture of collecting in Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters 1760

1820, Philadelphia, 2005; Claudia Swan, Collecting naturalia in the shadow of early modern

Dutch trade in Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds, Colonial Botany: Science,

Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, Philadelphia, 2007; Harold J. Cook,

Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, New

Haven and London, 2007, 304.

49 Scalliet, Back to nature in the East Indies: European painters in the nineteenth century

East Indies in Marie-Odette Scalliet, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeannette ten

Kate, Pictures from the Tropics: Paintings by Western Artists during the Dutch Colonial

Period in Indonesia, Amsterdam, 1999, 724; Zandvliet, Dutch Encounter with Asia, 388.

50 Scalliet, Back to nature in the East Indies, 75, fn 144. See also Jan Danil Beynon, Still

38

Life of Tropical Fruit, 1861, oil on canvas, private collection.

51 The poster was produced by the firm Kleyenberg & Co., Haarlem, and since the original on

which it is based is now in an unknown private collection, the KIT school poster is

reproduced here as Figure 5.

52 Hanna Klarenbeek, Koning, Elisabeth Johanna in Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van

Nederland, http://www.inghist.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/DVN/lemmata/data/Stapert (accessed

4 February 2010).

53 Natuurkundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch Indi, Batavia, 1860, 393.

54 Klarenbeek, Koning, Elisabeth Johanna.

55 Anneke Groeneveld, Photography in aid of science in Toekang Potret: 100 Years of

Photography in the Dutch East Indies 18391939, Leiden, 1989.

56 Liesbeth Ouwehand, Herinneringen in Beeld: Fotoalbums uit Nederlands-Indi, Leiden,

2009, 1729; Peter Kors, Kleingrothes images of technology: The reassuring view of the

Indies in Jane Levy Reed, ed., Toward Independence: A Century of Indonesia Photographed,

San Francisco, 1991, 537; Toekang Potret, 925.

57 An extensive list of prominent photographic studios in the Netherlands Indies is given in

Toekang Potret. For postcard production in the Indies, see Haks and Wachlin, Indonesia: 500

Early Postcards; Stephen Grant, Former Points of View: Postcards and Literary Passages

from Pre-Independence Indonesia, Jakarta, 1995.

58 John Bloom, Woodbury and Page: Photographers of the old order in Jane Levy Reed, ed.,

Toward Independence: A Century of Indonesia Photographed, San Francisco, 1991; Steve

Wachlin, Woodbury & Page, Photographers: Java, Leiden, 1994.

59 Examples of photographs from souvenir albums are KITLV inv. no. 75275, album 120;

KITLV inv. no. 87408, album 660 (Vues de Java); KITLV inv. no. 87530, album 662 (Album

van Indische Gezichten, Typen, Vruchten en Gewassen); KITLV inv. no. 110165, album 714

39

(Java: Batavia, Buitenzorg and Semarang, ca. 187080). Examples of single photographs are

KITLV inv. nos. 3148, 3353, 3354, 18856, and 26644.

60 See the examples and discussion in Alan Chong and Wouter Kloek, eds, Still-Life Paintings

from the Netherlands 15501720, Amsterdam and Zwolle, 1999, 201, 88, 90, 93, 95,13740,

1949, 2446.

61 See the image collections of the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde

(KITLV), Leiden, and the Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT), Amsterdam.

62 Although the photographers name is unknown, the album includes pictures of a man that

are labelled as ik (I), so we can at least be sure of his gender.

63 Anna-Karina Hermkens, Gendered objects: Embodiments of colonial collecting in Dutch

New Guinea, Journal of Pacific History, vol. 42, no. 1, 2007, 120.

64 Tobin, Domesticating the tropics, 1701. See also Jean Baudrillard, The system of

collecting in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds, The Cultures of Collecting: From Elvis to

Antiques Why do we Collect Things?, Melbourne, 1994, 78; Cook, Matters of Exchange,

208.

65 Tobin, Domesticating the tropics, 171, 183.

66 Zandvliet, Dutch Encounter with Asia, 269; Marie-Odette Scalliet, Beelden van Oost-

Indi: De collectie Bik in het Rijksprenten kabinet, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, vol. 49,

no. 4, 2001, 34379 at 349.

67 An 1898 photograph of the inner gallery in the home of Grard Valette, the Resident of

Pasuruan (Java), shows a shell collection on display: Rob Nieuwenhuys, Baren en Oudgasten,

Amsterdam, 1998, 157 [First published 1981].

68 See the botanical drawings of Nieuwenkamp, Frangipani Blossom and Hibisucus Flower,

both done in Bali 1906, reproduced in Bruce W. Carpenter, W.O.J. Nieuwenkamp: First

European Artist in Bali, Abcoude, 1997, 176, 183. For Willem Hofker, see works reproduced

40

in Bruce W. Carpenter, 19021981: Willem Hofker: Painter of Bali, Wijk and Aalburg, 1993,

323. Walter Spies interest in botanical collection found an outlet in 1940, when he was able

to visit the botanic garden at Buitenzorg, Java. Thereafter he produced botanical and

zoological drawings of his own, and entered into an enthusiastic correspondence over

specimens with M.A. Lieftinck, Director of the Zoological Museum of the garden from 1929

to 1953: see Spies letters in Hans Rhodius, ed., Schnheit und Reichtum des Lebens: Walter

Spies, Maler und Musiker auf Bali, 18951942. Eine Autobiographie in Briefen mit

ergnzenden Erinnerungen, gesammelt und hrsg. von Hans Rhodius, Den Haag, 1964, 415

27.

69 Maria Dermot, The Ten Thousand Things, New York, 2002, 1617, 49, 7980. [First

published 1955].

70 H.J. de Graaf, Ambon in Oude Aanzichten, Zaltbommel, 1972, 59.

71 Estelle Jussim and Elizabeth Lindquist-Cock, Landscape as Photograph, New Haven and

London, 1985, 41; Groeneveld, Photography in aid of science, 15; Elizabeth Edwards,

Introduction in Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography 18601920, New

Haven and London, 1992, 4; Susan Legne, De Bagage van Blomhoff en Van Breugel: Japan,

Java, Tripoli en Suriname in de Negentiende-Eeuwse Nederlandse Cultuur van het

Imperialisme, Amsterdam, 1998, 89; Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions:

Representations of the Native and the Making of European Identities, London and New

York, 2000, 11.

72 The painting, titled Nature Morte (Octobre), was exhibited in Brussels in December 1924:

see the catalogue of Le Mayeurs works provided in Jop Ubbens and Cathinka Huizing,

Adrien Jean Le Mayeur de Merprs, Painter-Traveller, Wijk and Aalburg, 1995, 200.

41

73

Stilleven met Bloemkool op Indische Doek was exhibited by the Bataviasche Kunstkring

(Batavian Art Circle), SeptemberOctober 1939: Rob Delvigne, Dolf Breetvelt: Modernist in

Ind