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It was November 2nd 2014. I was standing in front of an oil painting in Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. Surrounded by Dutch colonial heritages was a painting of Batavia, a Dutch made port with a big fort and a canal. The painting actually looked like a cartoon to me.
Let me play the audio guide.
This is a multi-cultural society in the 17th century. You see a dancer from Ambon with a shield. A Dutch man with a sash standing beneath the parasol next to an Indonesian woman. High up in one of the palm trees, you can see a man cutting coconuts. And on the river bank, there is a table filled with meat being sold by a Chinese merchant. In the background of the painting, you can see the massive building of the castle of Batavia where the Dutch colonist lived. And in front of the castle, you can see a procession with a Governor-General Joan Maetsuycker in his carriage. You can also see two elephants watching the event. An interesting detail is on the boat to the right in the corner. Can you see the man in the foreground sitting on the upturn boat? It is thought that he is the painter of this painting; Andries Beeckman. In the 17th century, it was common practice for an artist to paint himself as an observer somewhere in the painting.
Really? The guy doesn’t look like a Dutch person. He wears a hat and clothing typical for the locals. Is it possible to assume that the painter wanted to place himself on the side of colonised not the colonising? But wouldn’t it be problematic for a commision work from THE COLONIALIST COMPANY? Something is going on in here. (In fact, it was a “copy” painting by someone else.) This was one of the entry moment into a long journey that I had no idea where it’d bring me to.
The wall text said it was commissioned to a Dutch painter named Andries Beeckman in 1656 by the VOC. No Way! Probably Rembrandt would have been too expensive to ask but there must have been better 17th century Dutch painters for the world’s leading company of that time to commission a painting. It must be a joke or there must be a particular reason that it had to be this guy to paint.
I looked for more information on and offline. I soon understood that Andries had been to East Indies as a soldier of VOC and brought back many watercolor drawings he made during his trip. Roughly speaking, it took more than 8 month from Europe to come to East. Also two third of all the travelers didn’t make it back home for all sorts of reasons you can imagine. Therefore returning home with rare colored images from the East adds a certain authenticity(and probably wealth) to Andries as an information holder.
It was Jan 11th 2015. I walked into a huge room filled with luxurious 17th century antiquities in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and stood in front of the original painting. I was missing some figures include the guy on the upturn boat or I should say that some of the details of the copy is intentionally altered. But what was the intention of the copyist?
Let me read the wall text.
The Castle of Batavia, Andries Beeckman(?-1664), oil on canvas, 1661. The market of Batavia, with the fortress of the Dutch East Indian Company in the background. There are Javanese selling fruit, a Chinaman selling fish, and Mollucans kicking a rattan ball. The market public includes Japanese, Indonesians, ‘mardijkers'(freed slaves recognised by their striped clothes) and a Dutch-Indonesian couple with their slave carrying a pajoeng(parasol). The painting hung in the assembly room of the Oost-Indisch Huis in Amsterdam.
Wait a minute. What? Japanese? In Batavia? In 17th century? Yes, there is a man that seems could be a Japanese samurai (but rather strange appearance if so) but who is he anyway? Pursuing a question and now sidestepping into another one.
In 1635 things changed drastically in Japan. The Tokugawa Shogunate put strict border control over all the transaction of people, information and trading from going to and coming from abroad. It is often misunderstood even among Japanese that it was a hysteric regressive action to ‘close’ the country but it was actually a highly political power play and negotiation of the Shogunate that came through their careful analysis on the international geopolitics of that time. Limiting the access was very common strategy against European colonists. But by doing so, granting the permission of trading only to the Dutch among Europeans made the Shogunate able to control and even assign VOC an annual report over international affairs from Europe and Asia in exchange. The information was gathered through the VOC’s network around the world. It is quite astonishing that the deal lasted 200 years. Information was the money and the power maker.
It was Feb 13th 2015. In Amsterdam, I met a writer/art historian who had written a book about these two paintings of Andries. He mentioned that the Troppen copy has figures from Andries’s watercolours that were not in the original painting. This suggests that the copyist had studied both the collection of watercolours and the original painting. It might have been painted 20-30 years later than the original, which matches with the end of the Dutch Golden age. It made total sense to me with the ironical alterations on the copy. He was also very sure that Andries carried the pigment and made watercolors during the trip to capture the lives vividly with color. For example, if you look at a watercolor painting of a bird, the color is exactly the same as it is today.(Animals don’t change as much as we do.) Human memory cannot be so accurate after 8 month of rough voyage. The watercolors tell us that he had been to Madagascar, India, Malaysia, Batavia and possibly to Japan. It was normal for a VOC soldier to work for 3 or 5 years and go on a travel among colonies before heading back to Europe. And there is one watercolor of a figure that share the same feature as the “Japanese” in the painting, so he could have been to Japan and saw a samurai, the writer said.
It sounded very exciting but somehow I wasn’t convinced. Later, I searched the archive documents of VOC to see if there were any VOC ships to Japan Andries could have taken. I puzzled the diagrams and nailed it down to one ship that could possibly bring him there. He could have been to Deshima(Nagasaki), the tiny artificial island, but there aren’t any watercolors known from this possible period to prove his visit. It was usual that the soldiers stay on the ship since the high rank officers were the only ones allowed to land on Japanese territory. The chances were so slim for Andries to be exceptionally lucky to make it on land. Moreover, making contact to any Japanese were strictly prohibited and painting or drawing them and bringing them outside Japan would be out of the question. I’d rather think that the “Japanese” he painted was someone he met in Batavia. But then… Who was it?
Coming back to 1635 border control, quite some Japanese traders were locked out from the territory. Number of persecuted Catholics, too. The Shogunate had been aware of what Spain and Portugal had done in Asia and had concerns over them and their strong influence through church. Not to mention about the missionaries and local priests but also believers from high ranking samurais to farmers all over the countries were killed, tortured and deported to the islands of South East Asia for the sake of national security. Little is known about other Japanese who had lived and died in Batavia but I began to find little voices that had faded out. One of the documents I found suggested that over 100 samurais were hired by VOC as the soldiers in 1630’s. They were extremely valuable for the VOC to operate their combat. These samurai must have been the Ronin, type of samurais who lost their job/lords to work for after the end of civil war period. There were also another small group of Japanese women, wives or mistresses of European men and their mixed-raced children among the exiles. They were regarded as potential Catholics or betrayers and deported as well. Andries must have met these Japanese people in Batavia and painted one of them or made collective representation of them.
It was March 2nd 2016. I met an anthropologist/conservator for the collection of East Indies at Tropenmuseum. He helped me understand many details comparing to the example he collected from his field in Indonesia. The soundscape of the market of Batavia started to vibrate my imagination much vividly. But a question still remained. Who was the copyist sat on that upturn boat? He told me that he remembered seeing a different copy in Jakarta history museum and said that “the best way is to go there and ask because that’s how it works.”
That’s how I started chasing Andries and his samurai or their shadow and other copies that I heard about. It took me to Jakarta (Batavia), Hirado (Firando) and also to Anping (Tayouan) but that would be another sidesteps to tell you another time.(註1)