Aelbert Cuyp's Voc Senior Merchant

Home , Aelbert Cuyp, Cornelis de Houtman

AELBERT CUYP’S VOC SENIOR MERCHANT, HIS WIFE, AND MANSERVANT

(C. 1640-1660): COLONIALISM AND SOCIAL HIERARCHY

IN DUTCH BATAVIA

Alaina Hendrickson

Submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

Art History

Chair:

______Andrea Pearson, Ph.D.

______Kim Butler-Wingfield, Ph.D. ______Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences April 27, 2020 ______Date 2020

American University

Washington, D.C. 20016

Alaina Hendrickson

2020

AELBERT CUYP’S VOC SENIOR MERCHANT, HIS WIFE, AND MANSERVANT

(C. 1640-1660): COLONIALISM AND SOCIAL HIERARCHY

IN DUTCH BATAVIA

Alaina Hendrickson

ABSTRACT

The present study approaches Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife, and Manservant through a post-colonial lens in order to critically examine the complex interactions between the

Dutch VOC traders and indigenous peoples through servitude, social hierarchy, and cultural hybridity. The cohabitation of the city’s heterogeneous communities, coupled with the crucial yet threatening economic position of the Chinese, required careful VOC regulation in order to maintain their superior social position. A pajong-bearer depicted in the painting invites investigation into this social hierarchization, as well as the reception of representations of indigenous people and spaces during the era of Dutch globalization. Partially subsumed behind the prominent Dutch couple, yet accented by the large pajong, the figure is depicted as a

Europeanized foil to the Dutch commander. Through analysis of the significance of the pajong- bearer, I argue that Cuyp portrayed Dutch culture as superior and all-encompassing in order to reflect optimism in the future success of VOC trade and settlements in Asia.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Andrea Pearson, for challenging me to engage critically in the themes of race and gender in Dutch Baroque paintings. I would also like to thank my second reader, Dr. Kim Butler Wingfield, for her diligent edits and thoughtful suggestions.

Both of these women encouraged me to produce the highest quality academic material and for their constant investment in my success I am exceedingly grateful. I extend my gratitude to my parents, family and friends in D.C. and beyond who have continually supported my work in graduate school. Finally, and above all, I give thanks to God for the countless opportunities and fortuitous relationships that allowed this project to develop into a lifelong calling to post-colonial and feminist art history.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT.……………………………………………………………………………………....3

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.....………………………………………………………………….….4

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS....………………………………………………………………….. 6

INTRODUCTION: A PAJONG-BEARER IN DUTCH BATAVIA…………...………...8

CHAPTER 1 ANXIETIES ABROAD: STATUS SYMBOLS, TRADE OBJECTS AND SERVITUDE IN EARLY DUTCH BATAVIA………..…....…..…………...……...22

CHAPTER 2 VISUALIZING THE FUTURE OF DUTCH COLONIALISM THROUGH THE EUROPEANIZED PAJONG-BEARER …...………...……………..……..…..49

CONCLUSION: POST-COLONIAL IMPLICATIONS OF VOC PAINTINGS…...... 78

ILLUSTRATIONS...………………………………………...…………………………..83

BIBLIOGRAPHY.....………………………………………………………………….……...... 85

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Aelbert Cuyp, VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife, and Manservant, c. 1640-60. Oil on canvas. ……………………………………..………………………………………………….....81

Figure 2 : Andries Beeckman, Het Kasteel van Batavia, c. 1661. Oil on canvas. ……….……...81

Figure 3 : Albert Eckhout, East Indian Market Stall in Batavia, c. 1640-1666. Oil on canvas. ..81

Figure 4 : Detail. Joan Blaeu, Imperii Sinarum, 1665. Hand-colored print. …………………….81

Figure 5 : Unknown artist, Chinese Quilt for European Market, 17th century. Center panel and outer border: silk with gilt-paper-wrapped thread; pink borders: silk damask. ………….……...81

Figure 6 : Jacob Jansz. Coeman, Painting of Pieter Cnoll, Cornelia van Nieuwroode and their family, 1665. Oil on canvas. ……………………………………..………………………………81

Figure 7 : Anonymous artist, Bazar ofte groote merckt tot Bantam, from the travelogue of Cornelis de Houtman’s voyage to the East Indies (1595-97), 1597-98 or 1646. Etched engraving on paper. ……………………………………..…………………………………………………..81

Figure 8 : Julius Milheuser, Gezicht oft Batavia, published by Johannes de Ram, c. 1619-80. Etched engraving on paper. ……………………………………..…………………………….…81

Figure 9 : Anonymous artist, De gouverneur (Ki Patih) en de opper-Sjaich (Kali) van Bantam, 1596, from the travelogue of Cornelis de Houtman’s voyage to the East Indies (1595-97), 1597- 98 or 1646. Etched engraving on paper. …………………………….…………………………..81

Figure 10 : Titian, Portrait of Laura Dianti (Eustochia), c. 1520-25. Oil on canvas. …………..81

Figure 11 : Peter Paul Rubens, Man in Korean Costume, c. 1617. Black chalk with touches of red chalk in the face. ……………………………………..………………………………………….81

Figure 12 : Anonymous artist, Javanese Dance, from the travelogue of Cornelis de Houtman’s voyage to the East Indies (1595-97), 1597-98 or 1646. Etched engraving on paper. …………...81

Figure 13 : Wouter Schouten, Ambonese en Javaanse parades en een Maleier bruiloft, c. 1664. Pen, brush and pencil on paper. ……………………………………..…………………………..81

Figure 14 : Wouter Schouten, Studieblad met Chinese en Javaanse mannen en vrouwen, c. 1664. Pen, brush and pencil on paper. ……………………………………..………………………..…81

Figure 15 : Wouter Schouten, Studieblad, onder andere met een kok, etende mannen, een Javaanse Chinees en waterdragers, c. 1664. Pen, brush and pencil on paper. …………….…...81

Figure 16 : Aelbert Cuyp, Groom with Half-Hidden Horseman, c. 1650. Oil on canvas. ……...81

Figure 17 : Aelbert Cuyp, River Landscape with Riders, c. 1653-57. Oil on canvas. …..………82

Figure 18 : Frans Hals, Family Group in a Landscape, c. 1645-1648. Oil on canvas. ……...….82

Figure 19 : Aelbert Cuyp, The Negro Page, c. 1652. Oil on canvas. …………………………...82

Figure 20 : Aelbert Cuyp, Huntsmen Halted, c. 1650-55. Oil on canvas. ……………………....82

Figure 21 : Aelbert Cuyp, Avenue at Meerdevort, c. 1650-52. Oil on panel. …………………...82

Figure 22 : Aelbert Cuyp, Equestrian portrait of Pieter de Roovere, c. 1650. Oil on canvas. ….82

Figure 23 : Aelbert Cuyp, Equestrian portrait of Cornelis and Michiel Pompe van Meerdervoort with their Tutor and Coachman, c. 1652-3. Oil on canvas. ……………………………………..82

Figure 24 : Aelbert Cuyp, Lady and Gentleman on Horseback, c. 1655, reworked 1660-65. Oil on canvas. ……………………………………..………………………….……………….……..82

Figure 25 : Aelbert Cuyp, Portrait of a Man with a Rifle and Portrait of a Woman aged Twenty- One, as a Hunter, c. 1651. Oil on panel. …………………………………..…………………....82

Figure 26 : Aelbert Cuyp, Portrait of the Sam Family, c. 1653. Oil on canvas. ……….…...…..82

INTRODUCTION

A PAJONG-BEARER IN DUTCH BATAVIA

From his place in the shadows of the composition, a figure arrests the eye. Garbed in a bright ivory-colored jacket with a crisp white collar, pink trousers accented in blue, and dark polished shoes secured with vivid orange bows, he is unmistakably afforded visual emphasis.

Yet he is also visually marginalized in relation to the white male figure before him, who is rendered closer to the picture plane. This prominent male figure partially subsumes the first, suggesting a subservient status echoed in the unreciprocated gaze of the former toward the latter.

The white male individual is accompanied by a woman depicted beside but also slightly behind him, an arrangement that likewise asserts the hegemony of the foregrounded figure. These two are united by their austere attire of modest black wool, by the sharp turn of the woman’s head toward her companion, by their intertwined fingers, and by making the painting’s viewers the focus of their attention. They are united as well by their pearly white, rosy flesh, a feature that differentiates them from the companion behind, whose reddish-brown skin is duly emphasized even against the dark brush portrayed in the immediate background. This figure’s relationally subservient role is enhanced in his bearing of a large pajong or parasol, of silky golden cloth embroidered with vines and flowers, which he suspends over the other figures with the aid of a long pole. The fabric of the pajong is reminiscent of the pattern and texture of seventeenth- century Chinese silks, as demonstrated below. Together with the orange tree above, these surrounding features subtly situate the figures within the context of Chinese trade. The pajong- bearer, although substantially more prominent, similarly functions as an Asian signifier: he is, in fact, portrayed with the early modern pictorial conventions of a Javanese man, with the skin tone, black wispy hair, and short stature for such figures that appear in other works of the period. Yet 2 his buttoned shirtfront, white collar, ballooned trousers, tights, and footwear are derived from the culture of the male figure toward whom he looks. He is, with this approach, paradoxically

Europeanized.

In his painting VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife, and Manservant (Figure 1), Aelbert Cuyp presents a view into the bustling harbor of Dutch Batavia. The specificity of the facial features of the dark-clothed male and female figures in the foreground suggest that these are portraits, and the conjoined hands have been presumed to indicate marriage. The couple was tentatively identified by Kees Zandvliet as a VOC officer called Jacob Martensen (or Mathieuwsen) and his unnamed wife, referred to here as “Mevrouw” Martensen, the Dutch term for a married woman.1

They tower over the still water of the bay, which reaches toward the shore of the newly constructed city in the background. The mass of boats on the harbor are indicative of Dutch colonial prosperity: enormous homeward-bounders rendered with intricate detail tower over smaller jachten and indigenous boats, many of which fly prominently rendered flags of the

Dutch Republic (1581-1795). The two largest of these are indicated by the point of the officer’s rattan cane, which he holds horizontally to designate the entire city and harbor in a sweeping gesture suggestive of possession.

Aelbert Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife and Manservant (c. 1640-60) conveys and reinforces the mechanisms of social control in colonial Dutch Batavia. The cohabitation of heterogeneous communities within the trade port settlement, coupled with the development of mixed-race families, resulted in strategies for careful social regulation by the Dutch who wished to maintain their superior social position. Of these methods, the adoption of Javanese status symbols became a powerful means by which the Dutch employed cultural appropriation to both

1 Kees Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 1600-1950 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 181-2. Zandvliet’s conclusion is based on primary source evidence cited in the following footnote.

3 develop an original colonial presence as well as repress the Javanese in Batavia. Pajongs, or ceremonial parasols that were typically carried by enslaved indigenous men in the Javanese courts, quickly emerged in Dutch VOC households as means for social distinction both within the Dutch community and over the stratified hierarchy of minorities.

Cuyp’s portrait of the Dutch figures and their pajong-bearer posing before the colonialist fleet in the Batavia harbor responds to a compelling narrative from VOC maritime history. The three largest ships in the harbor have been identified as Salamander, Prins Frederik, and Banda, all of which were under the command of VOC commander Barend Pietersz Grotenbroek in

Batavia. The fleet left Batavia on December 1, 1640 with seventy-eight Portuguese prisoners, who were likely sent ashore at the Cape of Good Hope. Commander Grotenbroek died unexpectedly soon after their departure from the Cape in late January of 1641. Jacob Martensen, a well-ranked VOC officer under Grootebroek, was promoted to commander of the fleet on

February 5. According to Pieter van Dam (1621-1706), a lawyer for the VOC, Martensen was charged with ensuring safe passage of the fleet from the Cape to Batavia and was awarded one hundred rijksdaalders for his valiant efforts.2 While historians initially debated whether the depicted officer is Martensen or Grotenbroek, the fact that the painting was made in the Dutch

Republic after the return voyage indicates that it is almost certainly the former.3

The painting was commissioned sometime during the years immediately following

Martensen’s return voyage, although the circumstances of its production are unclear. It is reasonable to presume that Martensen ordered the painting to commemorate a notable moment in

2 Van Dam writes in Beschryvinghe van de Oostindiche Compagnie: “On the death of Captain Barent Pietersz, the command of the fleet fell to Jacob Mathieuwsen [sp. Martensens], who then brought the fleet home from the Cape, and for services rendered without recompense for the aforesaid command was honoured with the sum of one hundred rijksdaalders.”

3 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 181-2.

4 his career.4 Before its acquisition by the Rijksmuseum in 1908, its provenance extends to two sales in Rotterdam in 1839 and one each in 1859, 1873 and 1907.5 To add to the uncertainties, it is unclear if Mevrouw Martensen ever traveled to Batavia. Although it is possible that she accompanied her husband on his journey there, it is more likely that she remained in the Dutch

Republic or that the two met upon his return.6 Apart from the governors-general, whose wives were allowed to accompany them from the early colonial years, officers were not permitted to bring their families along to VOC trading posts without “especial dispensation” until 1652.7 It is therefore likely that the depiction of Mevrouw Martensen in Batavia is also fictitious. Despite the uncertainties surrounding the commission and subjects of this painting, the implications of its reflection of colonialist mechanisms of settlement and subjugation would have resonated with a seventeenth-century audience regardless.

Apart from the personal significance of the painting to the individual history of the

Martensens, the image is simultaneously situated within the crucial period of early VOC settlement and trade in Asia. After decades of preliminary trading in Southeast Asia, Batavia was officially founded by the VOC in 1619 as a permanent commercial and residential settlement.

Batavia, later renamed Jakarta when the Japanese overthrew the Dutch in 1942, gradually developed from a provincial if crucial trade port into a socially complex international city. In

4 At present, there is no known documentation of financial transaction or description of this painting to support any claim for its commission.

5 Provenance of VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife and Manservant: “bought in Rotterdam in 1839 by Nieuwenhuys [Sm]; sold in the same year for about £500 to Baron Northwick, Thirlestane House, Cheltenham [in Principal Gallery]; sale at house: Phillips 26-7-1859 (1590) £920 to Agnew. John Hargreaves [Accrington and Hall Barn Park, Bucks.], Christie 5-6-1873 (184) £231 to Agnew. R. Kirkman Hodgson, Christie 23-2-1907 (64) £945 to Dowdeswell. Muller, Amsterdam, sold in 1908 for /18,000” (Chong, “Aelbert Cuyp,” 487). 6 Most Europeans living at Southeast Asian trading posts were men. Those who did bring along their wives tended to establish their families or otherwise spend the duration of their lives abroad. It was less common for husbands and wives to travel together to Southeast Asia for brief periods of time (Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 198).

7 After 1652, officers could bring their families to VOC trading ports only if they agreed to an additional ten years of service beyond their usual term (Taylor, Social World of Batavia, 29).

Batavia, as in other early trade ports, the Dutch emulated the Portuguese in selecting strategic locations and cultivating diplomatic relationships with the local authorities. In most cases, the

VOC could not establish such ports unless the local ruler had granted permission.8 The first governor-general, Jan Pietersz Coen, whose controversial politics played a decisive role in future relations between the Chinese and Dutch, initiated some of the most noteworthy architectural projects, such as Batavia Fort, and organized the assemblage of a governing board. The initial foundation of VOC headquarters in Batavia inspired the foundation of subsequent trading companies to advance the Dutch economy elsewhere in the world, namely the Dutch West India

Company (WIC) in 1621.9

As one of the largest and most active ports for the VOC in Southeast Asia, Batavia served as a crucial point for the exchange of people, culture and goods. Scholars initially chronicled the historiography of Batavia through an informational, often laudatory approach. In a 1962 publication, M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz offers a comparative study of the position of native trade in Indonesia before and after the arrival of Europeans and the development of foreign trade, but does not critically analyze the contemporary and lasting effects of colonialism.10 A. T. Van

Deursen asserts that during the period of Dutch independence from the Spanish, social structures were unfixed and fluid, social positions changed often, the wealth of the Golden Age was not distributed evenly, and that religion functioned as a central albeit divisive pillar of everyday life.11 Johnathan Israel provides an examination of both the internal and external perceptions of

8 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 99.

9 Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherlands Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth- Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 15.

10 M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962). 11A. T. Van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion, and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland, trans. Maarten Ultee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

6 the Dutch Golden age, particularly after the unintentional split of the Dutch Republic into the

North and South.12 While Israel’s analysis of the success of the Dutch Revolt and subsequent

Golden Age is crucial for the understanding of the development of VOC, he does not critically examine Dutch colonialism or trade networks.13 Overall, early scholars present the history of

Batavia and the VOC from a perspective that glorifies the trials and successes of the Dutch over the experiences of non-European minority groups.

Postcolonial scholarship has shifted the historical conversation away from the praises of

Dutch trade development and toward a critical understanding of the impacts of colonization on indigenous communities. One of the earliest of such publications, the essays in Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia speak to two distinct points: first, that the labor system of

Southeast Asia was based for much of its history on the obligation of labor to a master or lord; second, that a form of bondage later recognized as slavery emerged and assumed a major role in economic and political life from within this broader basic pattern.14 In her chapter from the aforementioned volume, Susan Abeyasekere examines a slave list from 1816 and argues that although the register reflects the decrease in interest of slavery, debt-bondage would remain a popular practice for free labor in Dutch Batavia for decades to follow. In another exposé of colonial social hierarchy, Leonard Blussé explores the “patchwork quilt” model of economic

12 Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

13 It is important to differentiate between the objectives, operations, successes and failures of colonialism as manifested within the Dutch East and West India Companies. A comprehensive comparison of these two organizations can be found in G.J. Oostindie, B. Paasman, and Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, “Dutch Attitudes Towards Colonial Empires, Indigenous Cultures, and Slaves,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 31 (1998): 349–355.

14 Anthony Reid, ed., Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983).

7 accommodation and cooperation in relation to Batavia’s heterogeneous society.15 Blussé focuses both on social change within the shifting economic structures of the VOC and Chinese community, as well as the patterns of social relationships within the household as understood through the role and function of mestizo wives. These texts have invited critical investigation into the Dutch system of indigenous slavery, as well as into the negotiation of cultural difference within the shared marketplace.

It is important to note that, while the term “slavery” has been applied retroactively to describe the practice of largely involuntary servitude in Batavia, the contemporary terminology denoted all enslaved persons as servants. Degrees of individual freedom varied from case to case, but most indigenous servants in colonial households did not have bodily autonomy and could be sold, inherited and freed by their Dutch enslavers.16 The condition of servitude therefore removed all individual agency and humanity and perpetuated a commodified condition for

Batavia’s inferior class. Throughout this paper I will refer to those in conditions of involuntary servitude as “enslaved” persons. Further, I will follow the current guidelines for post-colonial scholarship and refer to the owners of said persons as “enslavers,” so as not to minimize their participation in the inhumane practice.

Apart from slavery, scholars have focused on the unique cultural hybridity that developed through mixed families of Dutch VOC husbands and Javanese wives. Ann Laura Stoler argues that familial mixing between the Dutch and Javanese threatened to compromise internal societal borders by calling into question the very criteria of “Europeanness,” citizenship, and

15 Leonard Blussé, Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1986).

16 Reid, Slavery, Bondage and Dependency.

8 nationality.17 In her related publication on the social world of Batavia, Jean Gelman Taylor investigates the development of the colonial society through the interactions of specific groups of Dutch settlers and indigenous peoples from which a distinctive culture emerged.18 While she focuses on the experience of Javanese wives, Taylor asserts that Dutch women enjoyed a privileged position in Batavian society and often enjoyed a more opulent and luxurious lifestyle than they would have in the Republic.19 All in all, postcolonial scholars have provided a rich backdrop of the unique development of cultural hybridity in Dutch Batavia but have yet to expand these conversations into discussions of artistic representations.

Despite the recent developments in critical scholarship, the discussion of paintings from the VOC, particularly of those containing representations of indigenous Javanese or other non-

Dutch figures, is extremely limited. Jean Gelman Taylor is one of the only art historians who has published several articles on paintings pertaining to Dutch Batavia. In her earlier article, Taylor analyzes Jacob Coeman’s Pieter Cnoll and his Family (1665) and argues that the painting provides an interesting space for the contemplation of racial relations, gender, trade, and cultural hybridity in seventeenth-century Dutch Batavia.20 In her later article, she takes as her case study several portraits of VOC women in order to investigate the social conditions of the VOC and the

17 Anne Laura Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 198-237.

18 Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asia, 2nd edition (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).

19 Taylor cites Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant as an example of this luxurious lifestyle. The official’s wife wears jewels, lace, and the fashionable, expensive, black clothing of the Dutch elite. Further, the wife’s clasped fingers with her husband testify to their companionate marriage, which was relatively unusual at the time (Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, 38).

20 Jean Gelman Taylor, “Meditations on a Portrait from Seventeenth-Century Batavia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (February 2006): 23–41.

9 experiences of women abroad.21 Taylor’s research will surely form the foundation of feminist and post-colonial art historical scholarship on paintings from the VOC, but her approach must be expanded to a wider sample of images.22

Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant is a primary example from the paintings of Dutch Batavia that requires further critical analysis, both as a previously under-analyzed work within Cuyp’s oeuvre and as a reflection of Dutch conceptions of colonialism. While his pastoral and agricultural landscapes are the primary source of his reputation, Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant is one of the more popular examples within his limited examples of portraiture.23 However, the identification of the figures and the veracity of the cityscape of Batavia remain speculative.

Some scholars conclude that Cuyp spent several years between 1640 and 1650 painting in Dutch

Batavia, although there appear to be no primary documents that support this. Kees Zandvliet,

Rijksmuseum curator for the Indies collection, was first to propose the identification of the VOC senior merchant as Jacob Martensen and his wife.24 Martensen took the place of the fleet’s original captain who died in transit from Java and likely commissioned this painting from Cuyp upon his arrival to the Dutch Republic. Jean Gelman Taylor, who accepts Zandvliet’s proposal for the identity of the sitters , argues that Cuyp never saw Java but rather transforms a Dutch

21 Jean Gelman Taylor, “Painted Ladies of the VOC,” South African Historical Journal 59 (2007): 47-78.

22 A later article by John Loughman similarly advocates for the reinsertion of Cuyp’s portraits within the oeuvre of his celebrated landscapes. Loughman raises an interesting point on the training and possible collaboration between Aelbert and Jacob Cuyp, asserting that Cuyp inherited the legacy of portraiture from his father who was the most successful portraitist in Dordrecht at the peak of his career (John Loughman, "New Light on Some Portraits by Aelbert Cuyp," The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1266 (2008): 584-91).

23 One of the earliest publications on Cuyp’s landscapes is Alan Chong’s PhD dissertation “Aelbert Cuyp and the Meanings of Landscape” (New York University, 1992). Apart from Chong and Wouter Kloek, few art historians have studied Cuyp in any critical capacity.

24 Kees Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 1600-1950 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).

10 landscape into a constructed version of the VOC port by means of Asian signifiers.25 Gelman also mentions VOC Senior Merchant in an earlier article, in which she compares the painting to

Jacob Coeman’s Pieter Cnoll and his Family (1665) as another example of an artwork that exemplifies the relationship between the Dutch and indigenous Javanese.26

In contrast with the speculative assessments of the sitters and setting of the painting, scholars agree upon the role of the Javanese pajong, or aristocratic parasol, as an important example of adoption of indigenous cultural signifiers by the Dutch. Julie Hochstrasser looks beyond the visible formal qualities of material objects painted in Dutch Golden Age still lifes in order to reinstate their relevant narratives and to interrogate the role of still-life images in the early history of consumer culture.27 Hoschstrasser takes Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant as an example of images of trade in Dutch Batavia and of the prevalence of pajongs amongst high- ranking officials. In the most recent publication on colonial Batavia, Marseley Kehoe argues that

Dutch elite gravitated toward ostentatious displays of wealth and status through the adoption of indigenous social symbols, such as the servant-held parasol.28 The significance of the pajong has been decently studied, but the indigenous manservant who holds it is universally neglected. This lack of consideration of human objectification illuminates the necessity for art historians to look beyond the objects and to prioritize the narratives of the historically repressed.

25 Taylor, “Painted Ladies of the VOC.” Dawn Odell similarly investigates contemporary receptions to Batavian architecture and infrastructure in her chapter “Public Identity and Material Culture in Dutch Batavia” in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, and Convergence; The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress on the History of Art, The University of Melbourne, 13-18 January 2008, edited by Jaynie Anderson, 253-57 (Carlton, Australia: Miegunyah Press, 2009). The maps and illustrations that Odell describes contributed to the continental understanding of the everyday conditions of Batavia for those like Cuyp who never traveled there.

26 Taylor, “Meditations on a Portrait.”

27 Julie Berger Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

28 Marsely L. Kehoe, "Dutch Batavia: Exposing the Hierarchy of the Dutch Colonial City," Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 7, no. 1 (Winter 2015).

The present study approaches Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife and Manservant through a post-colonial lens in order to critically examine the complex interactions between the

Dutch VOC traders and indigenous peoples through servitude, social hierarchy, and cultural hybridity. Apart from brief mentions in exhibition catalogues, web pages and PhD dissertations, this painting has never been extensively analyzed for its art historical or post-colonial significance. The objective of my research is to provide a compelling argument for the consideration of this piece within Dutch Golden Age paintings of globalization, but also within the postcolonial conversation surrounding the deliberate objectification and systematic repression of indigenous figures by Dutch colonial powers abroad.

Chapter 1 situates VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife and Manservant within the historical context of colonial Dutch Batavia and seventeenth-century globalization. The chapter opens by specifying the local condition of the Batavian social hierarchy, particularly as dictated by the negotiation of cultural difference within the city’s unique heterogeneous society. Further, the chapter provides a characterization of the political context of the position of the VOC within the

Asian trade network and an extension of the historical tensions between the VOC and Chinese to the contemporary social conditions of Batavia. Symbols of Chinese trade in Cuyp’s painting, namely the orange tree and silk fabric of the pajong, are situated within these commercial and cultural contexts. The discussion also offers possibilities for the reception of Cuyp’s painting by

Dutch audiences who would have understood both the setting and represented material objects to reflect concerns with the economic success of the VOC. This is supplemented with an exploration of the contemporary perceptions of mixed-race individuals, which inform the seventeenth-century Dutch perspective on fundamental difference and social hierarchy. The conclusion of this chapter emphasizes that the Dutch management and subordination of the

12 indigenous population of Batavia through servitude, which arose in response to the economic threat of the powerful yet largely uncooperative Chinese, required a balance of diplomatic exactitude and mediation of the emerging cultural hybridity.

Chapter 2 investigates the pajong-bearer both as an individual in relation to his enslavers, as well as a signifier of the indigenous minorities exploited by Dutch imperialism. This section examines the legibility of the pajong-bearer in relation to contemporary paintings of servants of color in Europe, as well as in relation to comparable figures in Cuyp’s oeuvre. The nuances of the formal relationship between the pajong-bearer and the Martensens are highlighted in order to argue that the former is situated as a foil to the pillars of Dutch values. The chapter then presents a discussion of the dynamics of race and gender that underlie this triadic relationship, as expressed specifically through the elements of hierarchical masculinity and marital unity.

Through the idealized lens of Cuyp’s painting, the intended message for the European audience becomes clear: neither the widespread indigenous population nor the economically powerful

Chinese could threaten the dominance and cultural unity of the Dutch in Asia. The conclusion asserts that Cuyp’s portrayal of the resilience and universality of Dutch culture, as expressed through the Europeanized pajong-bearer and hierarchy of figures, mitigates the anxieties surrounding Dutch authority over Dutch Batavia’s heterogeneous society.

By exploring the mechanisms of social control reflected within and perpetuated by the painting, we can begin to understand VOC Senior Merchant as implicated within the Dutch colonial and economic missions of the early seventeenth century. The text that follows illustrates the coding of Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife, and Manservant with post-colonial significance, as a reflection of both the experienced conditions of and desired objectives for seventeenth-century Dutch globalization in Asia. An investigation of the pajong-bearer reveals

13 that painted representations of non-white figures functioned as both sources and evidence of negotiations of difference and racial anxieties in early modern Europe. Together with the surrounding landscape and material signifiers of Chinese trade, Cuyp’s painting communicates the multivalent nature of Dutch concerns for their position of power abroad.

CHAPTER 1

ANXIETIES ABROAD: STATUS SYMBOLS, TRADE OBJECTS AND SERVITUDE IN

EARLY COLONIAL BATAVIA

The diversity of the colonial society of Dutch Batavia initiated an unprecedented negotiation of identity and difference. Artistic representations of Batavia reflect the experience of city life: Andries Beeckman’s Het Kasteel van Batavia (c. 1661) (Figure 2), for example, illustrates the bustling marketplace that teems with vendors from across the Asian trade network, while other images, such as Albert Eckhout’s East Indian Market Stall in Batavia (c. 1640-1666)

(Figure 3), illustrate the perpetuation of negative physical and cultural stereotypes from the

Asian colonies to European audiences. Paintings such as these indicate fundamental distinctions of “Asianness” in the Dutch imagination, namely between the economically powerful Chinese and socially inferior indigenous Javanese. Clearly, these two groups were viewed as culturally unique rather than homogeneously “Asian.” The longevity of Batavia as a permanent settlement hinged upon the differentiation, social stratification and segregation of the patchwork of minority communities, with the VOC positioned as the governing authority and defining itself as the pillar of cultural uprightness. Aelbert Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife and Manservant falls within these seventeenth-century representations of Dutch Batavia, incorporating both accurate

(or approximate) and invented elements in order to enhance the respective reputations of the

Martensens and of VOC trade in Asia. Contemporaneous representations of Batavia illuminate the breadth of concern for the economic strength of the Chinese within the Dutch imagination and enhance the political implications for Cuyp’s painting, with which these other images were in conversation, if indirectly.

The deliberately Europeanized pajong-bearer in Cuyp’s painting, the characteristics of which are discussed in detail in the following chapter, invites discussion into the Dutch colonial mission of social control. The VOC, whose members were outnumbered in Batavian society, sought to mitigate potential threats to their authority through the balance of Dutch cultural norms with displays of wealth and status, often through indigenous status symbols and the ownership of enslaved people. Cuyp’s depiction of the pajong-bearer directly addresses the colonial social structures that relied upon indigenous repression, while the position of the Martensens before the grand harbor view alludes to the broader concerns surrounding the retention of control over the colonial city and, by extension, of the Asian trade market. The silk textile used in the pajong and flourishing orange tree, both of which were introduced to Europe from China, subtly underscore the underlying Dutch concern for VOC’s relationship with the Chinese, whose alliance was crucial for their success within the Asian market. The significance of the orange tree is further obscured by its dual symbolism both of trade and of marital abundance, as discussed in the following section. The painting’s representation of economic and political superiority thereby assuaged the anxieties of audiences in the Republic surrounding the success of VOC maritime trade in Asia, specifically in response to trade incursions by the Chinese. Through careful study of the pajong-bearer within the context of the trade objects and setting, it is clear that Cuyp’s painting reflects and perpetuates the colonialist mechanisms of cultural appropriation and repression employed by the Dutch in their efforts to establish dominance over the people and economic environment of Batavia.

The Political Significance and Cultural Diversity of Colonial Batavia

Of all the trade ports that Cuyp could have been commissioned to represent, Batavia was the most central and relevant to the VOC stronghold abroad in the early-seventeenth century.

Within the first few decades of its foundation, Batavia quickly earned the title of “Queen City of the East” for its integral position within the VOC network.29 The city served as an important political and economic center due to its strategic location on the Sunda Strait at the entrance point to the Indian Archipelago. Trade ships passed through its harbor in route to foreign harbors and exchanged goods in the bustling international market. Envoys and local representatives of

Asian and European courts enjoyed extended stays in order to supervise trade and report on the politics of the region.30 This nexus of cross-cultural interactions as fostered through the exchange of people and goods resulted in respective amassing of ideas on a range of important subjects, including military strategy, the judicial system, and foreign customs.31 All the while, the newly minted stock exchange in Amsterdam stood at the core of the European market and influenced global missions substantially. Even the architecture of the colonial city, which will be discussed later in this chapter, served as an omnipresent reminder of the shadow of the Dutch financial center on the successful function of settlements abroad. Through the establishment of a major port in Batavia, the Dutch were able to tie their existing presence in European, African and

American trade into the Asian network.

Despite the eventual securement of a position of political superiority, the Dutch did not immediately dominate Batavia’s bustling international trade community. In contrast with the

29 This nickname emerged during the seventeenth century and was later used in reference to Batavia in historical texts such as G. G. van der Kop, Batavia, Queen City of the East (London: G. Kolff & Co., 1926).

30 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 100.

31 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 100.

WIC’s mission to colonize West Africa and the New World, the VOC initially focused on commercial rather than territorial gain.32 Inevitably, colony-like communities developed around the major VOC ports, including Batavia (after 1619), the Cape of Good Hope (after 1652), the

Spice Islands, and along the coast of India in order to provide long-term residency for Dutch traders abroad.33 The Dutch were not the only settlers in these colonial cities: other communities similarly initiated permanent or semi-permanent housing in ports across their respective trade networks. By 1673, Batavia was home to about 27,000 people: 2,000 Dutch, 700 Eurasians,

2,800 Chinese, 5,000 Indians, 3,000 Javanese and others from the archipelago, and 13,000 enslaved people of unspecified origin.34 The variety of ethnic communities living and trading in

Batavia prompted the Dutch to exercise sensitivity and diplomacy in order to secure their superior position. For this reason, colonization initiatives under the VOC are characterized as relatively “superficial” and unimposing.35 The Dutch never enforced an obligatory language, nor did they establish a local education system or engage in extensive missionary projects.36

However, the VOC engaged in light but steadfast regulation of non-Dutch groups, including the requirement of a military presence, both Dutch and otherwise, at local church council meetings.37

32 For a direct comparison of the motivations and colonial “accomplishments” of the VOC and WIC, see G.J. Oostindie, B. Paasman, and Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, “Dutch Attitudes Towards Colonial Empires, Indigenous Cultures, and Slaves,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31 (1998). 33 Oostindie, “Dutch Attitudes,” 350.

34 Marsely Kehoe, “Dutch Batavia: Exposing the Hierarchy of the Dutch Colonial City,” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 7, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 18.

35 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 33.

36 In the early years of the seventeenth century, the VOC initially pushed back against the Portuguese’s Roman Catholic mission with a Calvinist one (Oostindie 349). The Calvinist mission diminished later in the century as the Dutch gained monopoly over their trade settlements and were no longer in direct competition for local control with the Portuguese.

37 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 33.

The primary objective of the VOC was to establish and maintain a commercial network rather than stifle indigenous culture and evangelize local communities.38

Although constrained by the expectation of cooperation with the VOC’s administrative objectives, minority communities were encouraged to operate relatively independently. Batavia’s heterogeneous society reflects a “patchwork quilt model” of economic accommodation.39 As described by Leonard Blussé, the population of Batavia consisted from the outset of many different ethnic groups who lived more or less separately and carved distinct spaces for themselves within the shared marketplace. Within a “plural society” such as this, Blussé argued, each group eventually realizes that the sacrifice of identity also leads to the sacrifice of collective stakes in the shared market, which leads to jealous protection of economic, political and social interests.40 The Batavian settlement was the first case in which the Dutch were forced to reconcile with a heterogeneous urban society. The negotiation of identity and colonial objectives by the Dutch were met with those of other minority groups who similarly navigated “patchwork quilt” heterogeneity. As surmised by Blussé, the fluid administrative model of cooperation

38 The initial focus on trade and commerce over cultural propagation developed in part from the fact that the Portuguese had already integrated within many of the major Southeast Asian communities. The Portuguese settled along the Indonesian coasts almost one hundred years before the Dutch arrived. Several generations of mestizo, or mixed-race, families already lived in and around Portuguese trading posts with their own distinct culture. Over the generations, however, mixed-race Dutch families became increasingly common. Marrying into a mixed-race family was an opportune decision for an indigenous person as it ensured a career in the VOC or Portuguese trading companies. This mixed-race culture would become more important in the eighteenth century, but examples like Coeman’s portrait of the Cnolls illuminate early negotiations of the complex social positions of mixed families (Oostindie, “Dutch Attitudes,” 349).

39 The “patchwork quilt model” is introduced in relation to Batavia by Leonard Blusse in his introduction to Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1986).

40 Plural society is typically used as an economic concept, but can be applied to political and social circumstances (Blussé, Strange Company, 5).

19 eventually solidified into a fixed position when Dutch interests clashed with opposing subjects, such as the Chinese.41

Paintings of Batavia’s heterogeneous society confirm both the prominence of the Chinese within the trade market as well as the outnumbered position of the Dutch among the numerous minority communities. Andries Beeckman, a painter employed by the VOC, lived in Batavia for several years around 1655 and produced one of the best-known paintings of the city’s bustling market.42 Beeckman’s Heet Kasteel van Batavia (c. 1661) (Figure 2), a large scale work that was displayed prominently in the boardroom of the East Indies House in Amsterdam in 1662 until it became part of the Rijksmuseum collection in 1859, provided the VOC directors with a comprehensive view of one of their most successful trade ports.43 The painting bolstered the morale and collective mission of the governing board, as well as provided a favorable testimonial of the global extent of VOC trade to important guests. At the center, a couple wearing comparably conspicuous clothing is trailed by a pajong-bearer, who, like Cuyp’s, stands significantly shorter with dark skin and hair. In place of a court costume, the manservant, wearing a bright red robe and golden cap, walks barefoot. Portrayed in self-aggrandizing attire and married to a Dutch-Javanese woman, which was common, the officer does not exemplify the same pillars of the ideal Dutch identity as Jacob Martensen in Cuyp’s painting. In fact, this officer is far more representative of the reality of performative social hierarchy in Batavia. The couple stands apart from the diverse crowd beneath the massive palm trees, including indigenous

Javanese, Chinese traders, Japanese Christians, and Portuguese. The Chinese, represented with

41 Blussé, Strange Company, 6.

42 Beekman produced ethnographic drawings of Batavian residents that illustrate the Dutch perspective on minority groups. One example is Beekman’s drawing Japanese Christian remained in Jakarta after Sakoku (c. 1656), whose Christianity is indicated by his wide-brimmed hat.

43 “The Castle of Batavia, Andries Beeckman, c. 1661,” Rijksmuseum, accessed February 3, 2020, https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-19.

20 thin moustaches and hair tied in buns, are engaged in diverse activities: they haggle, sell their wares at tables, and board ships on the river. Unspecified indigenous figures, who are represented with the darkest skin and mostly shirtless, sell goods on the ground or play games in the trees. The Dutch wear black brimmed hats and white collars and congregate in boats on the water. The central officer contrasts with the rest of the Dutch both as the only man to employ a personal pajong-bearer and from his luxurious clothing, which similarly exemplifies the defiance of VOC codes for the adoption of luxury social markers. Beeckman’s painting illustrates the outnumbered position of the Dutch in Batavia, as well as the social prominence that could be achieved through the employment of a pajong-bearer.

Social Performance and Cultural Appropriation

The Dutch, who constituted one of the smallest factions of Batavian society, required a means to secure their position of authority over the larger populations of Chinese, Indonesians,

Indians, and enslaved people while maintaining the integrity of their collective identity.44

According to Marsely Kehoe, this resulted in conflicting demands. The governing body of the

VOC attempted to enforce social legislation that would, in theory, limit ostentatious displays of wealth and produce the illusion of a cohesive and culturally “Dutch” group by retaining the established decorum for clothing and public behavior. However, the stratified nature of colonial society, which differed greatly from that of the Republic, caused many of the Dutch to adopt status symbols as a competitive means to assert dominance over each other and other groups.45

44 The concern of maintaining authority over other ethnic groups heightened as more and more traders and their families relocated to Batavia. For example, the Chinese population in Batavia grew rapidly from about 300 in 1619 to more than 3,000 in 1627 (David Henley and Henk Schulte Nordhodt. Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 152).

45 Kehoe, “Dutch Batavia,” 2.

This led to the hierarchization of individual status through showy dress, accessories, and the ownership of personal slaves. The Dutch adopted physical markers that were both European in origin, including fine jewelry and the decoration of carriages, and indigenous, such as the pajong.

However, such displays violated Dutch social norms of modesty and threatened the social cohesiveness of the already-outnumbered minority group.46 The adoption and display of indigenous social markers served to both differentiate the Dutch Batavians from the rest of the

Dutch population, as well as to ensure the superiority of the Dutch over the other local communities.

In order to enhance performative superiority, VOC officers appropriated indigenous

Javanese luxury symbols. For centuries, pajongs and their bearers were used by the Indonesian elite both to shield themselves from the hot sun and to indicate superior social status. The height and opulence of the pajong immediately indicated wealth, while the servant who carried it underscored the social position of his master. For the Dutch officer who employed the pajong- bearer, the social symbol functioned both on an individual level to communicate the status of the user, as well as on a collective level to emphasize the supremacy of the VOC. For the Dutch officer and his wife in the Cuyp painting, the pajong and its bearer functioned both on an individual level to communicate their status, as well as on a collective level to emphasize the supremacy of the VOC through appropriation of indigenous culture.

The pajong eventually became divisive in Batavia, however, for its threat to the image of cohesiveness of Dutch culture. In 1647, the employment of pajong-bearers was outlawed except for the very highest-ranking VOC Senior Officers, specifically the governor-general and his

46 The employment of pajong-bearers was eventually prohibited by a set of 1647 laws. This law arose from complaints of the unnecessary employment of pajongs outside of the user’s station or need of shade and concludes that if one needed the pajong for practical reasons (shade or rain), he must carry the parasol with his own hands (Jacobus Anne van der Chijs, Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek, vol. 2 (Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1885–1900), 111).

22 council.47 Even then, these officers were only allowed to use the pajong if they carried it themselves. This practice inevitably met with resistance. Dutch Batavians continued to use pajong-bearers in order to differentiate themselves culturally from the distant Dutch Republic, but also as a means for social competition among the members of the upper class.48 For many, the beginning of a new life and career in Batavia provided opportunity to challenge previous social positions and brand themselves anew. Despite efforts by VOC administrators, Dutch

Batavians developed ostentatious displays of status and rank that defied their continental social norms and incorporated elements of indigenous culture.

Beyond the immediate implications for personal standing, the adoption of pajongs by the

Dutch elite testifies to the larger implications of colonial mechanisms as manifested through cultural appropriation. The impulse to take, borrow, and make for one’s own was fundamental to

European colonialism. Colonized people and places were positioned within the European imaginary as physically inferior, culturally fascinating, and desperately in need of outside paternal leadership. Rather than acknowledge and accept the distinct cultural practices within their original contexts, the European colonizer sees opportunity to improve or benefit from their removal and reclaiming. The translation of the indigenous pajong-bearer by Dutch colonizers for the performance of social superiority exemplifies this tendency. Pride in the appropriation of the indigenous pajong and pajong-bearer was reflected through public promenades in the shared marketplace, as well as through their prominent inclusion in Dutch portraiture. Although hybridized, Dutch culture posited superiority through the reframing and adoption of indigenous culture for the advancement of the VOC’s colonial administration. By claiming the superior

47 Kehoe, “Dutch Batavia,” 1.

48 The repetition of these laws limiting the use of the pajong throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries indicate that Dutch Batavians constantly resisted against their own status and social norms (Kehoe, “Dutch Batavia,” 2).

23 aspects for themselves, the Dutch engaged in situationally legible social performance and contributed to the social subordination of the indigenous Javanese.

Precarious Origins: The VOC Struggle for Successful Trade Relations and Local Control

Displays of social prominence by the Dutch in the Southeast Asian colonies developed in response to the precariousness of VOC authority over the heterogeneous colonial society. The

VOC stripped the local Jakartan government of control in 1618 and redirected authority from the

States General to the governor-general, who was assisted by the Council of the Indies.49 Despite the endowment of authority to the VOC, much of the Asian territories remained partially under indigenous control. In Java, the VOC shared leadership with several native princes, the relationship between which developed into that of vassal to liege. Similar to the relationship between the States General and the VOC, the VOC retained ultimate superiority but did not interfere with local laws, customs and religions. In all instances, the VOC attempted to follow, or at least acknowledge, the governing example of the indigenous rulers and focused primarily on their assurance of allegiance of the local superiors rather than of the populations under their control.50 All in all, the VOC occupied an intermediary administrative position, the economic success of which was contingent upon the cooperation of their diverse subjects and support by the Dutch government.

This proved a difficult balance to maintain. The initial source of tensions between the

VOC, the administration in the Hague and the Chinese can be traced to 1619, the year of

Batavia’s founding. The first governor-general, Jan Pieterz Coen, developed a notorious

49 Zandvliet. The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 31.

50 Zandvliet. The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 32.

24 reputation with the Chinese and local indigenous authorities that would cloud Dutch trade relationships for decades to follow. A firm supporter of domination through force, Coen was constantly at odds with the VOC board of directors who wanted to achieve commercial success without violent or costly methods.51 Coen’s infamous motto, “Dispereert niet, ontsiet uwe vyanden niet (Do not despair, do not spare your enemies),” captured his firm belief that the competition should be eliminated by force if necessary. In 1621, Coen orchestrated a massacre on the island of Banda in order to seize the port for the Dutch.52 From there, he tried unsuccessfully to take the Chinese island of Macao from the Portuguese in an attempt to control the Chinese junk trade to Batavia.53 Controversial policies under Coen dictated the course of relational tensions between the Dutch and Chinese. The legacy of Coen’s initial violence remained prominent in the Chinese imagination, with political leaders consistently referring to the Dutch as the “red-haired barbarians” throughout the seventeenth century.54

The Chinese were well-established in their trade networks and required relatively little from the Dutch; by contrast, VOC interest in the retention of a cooperative relationship with the

Chinese arose from economic and political necessity. This dependence threatened the image of

51 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 79.

52 The effects of the massacre in Macao were immediate. Following the events of 1621, the Chinese decided to pursue a policy of “aloof withdrawal” of the Dutch from their trade ports and instead directed Dutch ships to Taiwan. However, after 1644, the advent of the Qing Dynasty and resistance by Chinese Ming loyalist Coxinga (Cheng Ch’eng-Kung) further limited the Dutch presence in Chinese territory. In 1661, Coxinga drove the Dutch from Taiwan and established the Kingdom of Tungning. This prompted the VOC to send delegates to intensify contacts with China’s Manchu leaders and express solidarity against their common foe. The Chinese, who had been solidly established in local trade networks for centuries and had already cultivated a productive liaison to Europe with the Portuguese, did not require much of anything from the VOC. The negotiations were notably brief and fruitless. From 1661 to 1664, the VOC sent fleets from Batavia under Admiral Balthasar Bort to the Taiwan strait to assist Manchu forces against Coxinga. A year later in 1665 Dutch ambassador Pieter van Hoorn went to Peking to ask the Qing rulers to sign a new trade agreement, but with no success. The Dutch would later found Fort Zeelandia in Taiwan (Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 139-40).

53 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 80.

54 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 143.

25 the VOC as independent and authoritative, which Cuyp attempted to counter through his favorable image of the Dutch officer and Batavian harbor view. The success of Dutch trade largely depended upon the position of the Chinese as intermediaries to the Southeast Asian market.55 Although the VOC mobilized the most substantial numbers of personnel and fleets to

Southeast Asia among all European trade companies, their ships and manpower remained inadequate to sufficiently acquire and transport goods between ports, let alone to send products back to the European market.56 Therefore, Dutch traders relied upon the Chinese to assist with acquisition and transportation. In order to preserve trade relations and the diplomatic impression of equality, the Dutch cultivated the illusion of Chinese independence by granting them greater privileges than most other minority communities. However, the governors-general claimed the right to appoint Chinese officials with whom they ultimately worked quite closely. In 1619, Jan

Pietersz Coen initiated this practice and appointed Su Ming-Kang as headman of the Chinese citizenry.57 Ming-Kang had a history of cooperating with the VOC in both economic and political capacities and served as a reliable intermediary between the Dutch and the Batavian

Chinese faction. By fostering relationships with both the Chinese leaders and populace within the confines of the colonial city, the Dutch were able to maintain relatively peaceful relations with their most crucial local ally.58

55 For the particularities of the relationships between the Dutch, Chinese, and Indonesian traders, see Henley, Environment, Trade and Society, 160-65.

56 Between 1602 and 1796, the VOC sent almost one million individuals to work in the Asia trade and 4,785 ships, most of which were dispatched to Southeast Asia. These numbers include burghers, or retired or independent traders (Henley, Environment, Trade and Society, 160).

57 Blussé, Strange Company, 81.

58 Financial dependence upon the Chinese as a major source of tax revenue enhanced the necessity of a cooperative relationship. The VOC instituted obligatory military service for all Chinese citizens, but counteracted this statute with a tax that could allow individuals to evade the requirement. Most Chinese did not want to serve the Dutch in a military capacity and willingly paid the tax. The commercial success of the Chinese, of which the Dutch were keenly aware, contributed to their capacity to afford expensive taxation. A strategic outcome of this legislature, the

Ultimately, the Chinese continued to occupy a central albeit controversial position within the Batavian market. Circulating written and illustrated accounts of the Chinese contributed to the collective, albeit stereotyped, Dutch understanding of their culture and values, which would have illuminated the context of the hazy colonial settlement in the background of Cuyp’s painting. Employees of the VOC often wrote in regard to the character of the Chinese, the financial success of which was often attributed to their mendacious and covetous nature. In 1633,

Governor-General Brouwer said that the Chinese citizens were “in all respects superior to the

Dutch,” but warned that “they are so full of deceit that we cannot trust them at all.”59 Travel books written by those in the VOC, including that of Christopher Frick, reflect the dominance of the Chinese rather than the Dutch in the management of the collective trade business. Frick, a

German, left for Southeast Asia on February 28, 1677 and served the VOC as a surgeon from

May 1680 until late 1685. From the beginning, Frick’s written opinions of the Chinese are clouded with distrust. Upon his first arrival to the Batavian harbor, he notes the prevalence of the

Chinese: “They exceed all the others by far, in cunning and policy; and are very good

Mechanicks; and there are them of all Trades.”60 It is clear from his initial impressions that he considered the Chinese to be both impressive and threatening, but the negative assessments grew to dominate throughout the course of the journal. In the early chapters, Frick critiqued the disturbing frivolity and financial recklessness of the Chinese traders:

Dutch were able to ensure that their Chinese citizens remained unarmed and vulnerable, as only members of the military could legally own a firearm (Blussé, Strange Company, 81). Not only did the VOC profit additional revenue from the Chinese, but the tax ensured a perpetual condition of financial and physical subordination. Where cooperation with the Chinese government as a whole proved difficult, the development of a productive relationship with the local Chinese community in Batavia was far more achievable. By putting in place mechanisms of social control that financially and politically subordinated the Chinese, the VOC were able to temporarily mitigate their threat to trade development and attempt to initiate an alliance.

59 Blussé, Strange Company, 81.

60 Ernest C. Fayle, Voyages to the East Indies: Christopher Fryke and Christopher Schweitzer (Cassell: London, 1929), 35.

Their hair [the Chinese men] value at the highest rate, since it is the last thing they will stake at play. They are the greatest Gamesters that ever were known; insomuch as they will play away their Wives and Children, when they have lost all their Wealth: and when their Houses and Family are lost, then goes the very Hair off of their heads.61

Here, Frick emphasizes several perceived negative attributes of the Chinese: irresponsibility, lack of familial structure, and vanity. Moments of notable cultural differences shocked the Dutch travelers and dictated their approaches to subsequent interactions.62 The focus in these first-hand accounts upon fundamental differences in appearance, values and cultural practice ultimately functioned to position Dutch Europeanness as “correct.”

Exaggerated accounts of the recklessness and immorality of the Chinese were perpetuated through travel writing to audiences in the Dutch Republic, where artists adapted them into negative caricatures. Albert Eckhout’s depiction of a stereotypical Chinese trader translates the anxiety over avarice and cunning into a physical threat. In this depiction of a

Batavian market stall, three generalized “Indian” women manage an assortment of fruit for sale, which includes durian, mangoes, grapefruit, bananas, copra, mangistan, and pineapple.63 The two women closest to the Chinese man gaze open-mouthed at his face, evidently engaged by his bartering rhetoric. The man is depicted using European damaging techniques of caricaturization for Chinese people: his long hair is pulled into a bun and secured with a pin, his eyes almond- shaped, and his moustache and beard long and wispy. He wears a shapeless dark colored robe which exposes his collarbone and chest. The most disconcerting aspect of his appearance is

61 Fayle, Voyages to the East Indies, 36.

62 Nearly all of Frick’s accounts of the Chinese reflect their inherent dishonesty and inhumanity. For example, Frick recounts an instance where he and an old Dutchman go oystering with a Chinese fisherman off the coast of Batavia. The weather appeared threatening, but the Chinese man assured them that all would be well. When the weather eventually turned, the boat capsized and the old man drowned. Frick blames the Chinese man entirely and proceeds to beat him upon their return to shore (Fayle, Voyages to the East Indies, 114).

63 The paper painted at the bottom right of the composition lists the fruits shown.

28 certainly his fingernails, which grow several centimeters long into cat-like claws that he uses to pinch a coin. The gaze of the white cockatoo appears to be squarely fixed upon the claws as if even animals are made instinctually uneasy by these unusual people. His demeanor is confident and imposing, particularly as emphasized through the transfixed yet recoiled bodily responses of the female figures. Considering that Eckhout, like Cuyp, did not travel beyond Northern Europe, it is clear that concerns surrounding both the duplicity and economic vigor of the Chinese were circulating in the Republic. The inclusion of specific details, such as the tropical fruit and bird of paradise, enhance the perceived authenticity of the image and exacerbate the reality of stereotypes within the Dutch imagination.

Evidence of Chinese Trade in Cuyp’s Painting

Although Cuyp’s painting does not illuminate the social hierarchy of Batavia through explicit figural representations, the inclusion of recognizable and significant trade objects illuminate both the diversity of Batavia and the significance of the image within the greater context of the Asian market. The oranges, silk pajong, and indigenous pajong-bearer, all of which are owned by or directly associated with the Martensens, allude to the couple’s wealth and involvement within the global trade market. Further, the setting of these elements before the bay filled with VOC trade ships underscores the aspect of movement through importation and exportation. The harbor visible in the background does not feature a lively market scene like in

Beeckman’s painting, but the symbolic indications of the exchange of people and goods similarly allow the image to resonate within the contemporary concerns for Dutch command over the

Asian trade network.

In Cuyp’s image, the orange tree contributes to the contextual specificity of the composition and would have appealed directly to the contemporary concerns of the globally- minded audience. Oranges in early modern art function as polyvalent symbols, as seen in the following chapter in connection to marital abundance and fertility in relation to Martensens.

However, in concert with the silk pajong fabric, the orange tree can be understood to reinforce

Chinese trade. The history of the orange in Europe was well-known among Dutch audiences and the fruit appeared often in seventeenth-century still-life.64 The arrival of the sour orange varietal to the Roman port of Ostia from northern India and South China dated to the first century A.D.

Around the same time, orange trees were brought from North Africa to southern Spain by the

Moors. Although the Roman imports eventually slowed with the Sack of Rome, African orange trees grew across Spain and Portugal by the thirteenth century. Sweet oranges, a newer varietal, were brought to Europe from China by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century. Within the next two-hundred years, both types of oranges were cultivated throughout southern Europe and in hothouses, or orangeries, in northern Europe.65 The orange could therefore be tied to several different historical moments and regions, but visual evidence suggests a link between the fruit and China in the seventeenth-century Dutch imagination. In Joan Blaeu’s map Imperii Sinarum

(Empire of China) (1662) (Figure 4), several Chinese figures flank the central cartouche. The women tempt their male counterparts with stems of oranges, while heavily laden branches droop

64 Seventeenth-century still-life paintings support the connection between oranges, luxury goods, and Chinese trade in the Dutch imagination. The fruits were often depicted within Chinese porcelain bowls, as seen in Jacob van Hulsdonck’s Lemons, Oranges, and Pomegranates in a Wan Li Porcelain Bowl (c. 1600-40), which emphasized their shared origin and value (Sander, The Magic of Things, 100). Although there are not examples of Chinese porcelain in Cuyp’s composition, the Chinese silk textile from which the pajong is constructed created a similar dynamic reference between the orange tree and Chinese trade.

65 Julie Hochstrasser, Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 75. This is a crucial resource for the significance of fruit in Dutch Golden Age paintings.

30 below their feet.66 Oranges feature prominently in many examples of Dutch Golden Age still-life and often rest within or alongside pieces of Chinese porcelain. Apart from the visual evidence, the Dutch term for orange, sinaasappel, directly translates to “China apple” and provides an etymological link.

The orange tree in Cuyp’s painting, like the pajong and its bearer, alludes to Jacob

Martensen’s integral role within the global trade market and underscores the flourishing success of trade by the Dutch with China. Such a reference would have conjured within the imagination of the audience in the Dutch Republic a connection between the authority of the Martensens over the Batavian fleet with the desired position of control of the VOC. The pajong encompasses the width of the orange tree and communicates ownership of its fruitfulness by extension. The tip of

Jacob’s rattan cane nearly touches a leaf on one of the heavy branches, a gesture that he may be indicating both the ships in the harbor and the tree beside him. The deliberate placement of the

Martensens and their material goods before the orange tree convey their idea of direct responsibility for its abundance. Although wild oranges would have been understood as natural to the landscape and indicative of Asian rather than cultivated European varietals, and although oranges certainly grew in Indonesia, the correlation between the fruit and China by the Dutch in the seventeenth-century would have pointed to Chinese trade above all else. The early years of trade with China under the leadership of Coen, which will be discussed later in this section, were impeded by tensions and violence. The orange tree rather suggests the prosperity of the Dutch through illusory control over the Chinese market, much like the pajong-bearer’s symbolism of

Dutch superiority in colonial ports of the Asian trade network.

In addition to the significance of the orange tree, the pajong is deliberately rendered with unique design and material in order to directly reference the Chinese textile trade. Unlike the

66 Hochstrasser, Still Life, 77.

31 other examples of pajongs as portrayed in Dutch prints, which appear to be made mostly of wood and are meagerly decorated, Cuyp’s pajong is an explosion of color and texture. At the center flies a bird with long neck, trailing tail and wide wings that resembles a simurgh or peacock motif. Chinese coverlets or panels produced for the European market often featured circular embroidered designs with floral detailing and playful birds and wild animals. The golden silk fabric, embroidered flora and fauna are distinctly derived from Chinese textiles. A seventeenth- century example of Chinese silk textile from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was produced for the European market, visually resembles the design of Cuyp’s pajong with exotic birds embroidered in gilt paper-wrapped thread perched among the flowering branches (Figure

5). Regardless of whether this pajong design was actually implemented in colonial Java, it is clear that Cuyp applied his knowledge of Chinese textiles that were available in the European marketplace to construct a significant, legible trade object. To this effect, the pajong symbolizes both appropriation of indigenous social symbols and successful participation by the Dutch within the Chinese silk trade.

Indigenous Servitude and City Planning

While the reference to Chinese trade is symbolically implicit in Cuyp’s painting, the reflection of indigenous servitude is explicit. The pajong-bearer represents the larger community of indigenous people in Batavia who occupied the lowest sectors of the social hierarchy, functioning in both enslaved and freed capacities. Indigenous servitude was ubiquitous across

Batavia’s social and physical landscape. Prior to the arrival of the Dutch, the indigenous elite owned slaves from the lowest social strata, both from Java and elsewhere in the archipelago. The

Chinese also had a history of slavery and servitude that they continued in Batavia, both with

Chinese and indigenous local servants. In the Southeast Asian colonies, the VOC emulated the structure of servitude within the indigenous elite and populated both their political offices and households with indigenous slaves. Batavia developed into the unofficial headquarters for the massive trade system of slaves from Arkan, Bengal and Coromandel, among other places. In the

1650s, when the port city expanded from a temporary trade site to settler colony, the major development projects for the local infrastructure were built by enslaved and unfreed exile or convict labor.67 Slavery was integrally connected to the formative decades of Batavia as a prominent economic and social practice.

Dutch audiences of Cuyp’s painting would have recognized and appreciated the social value of the indigenous pajong-bearer for the Martensens in Batavia as comparable to that of an

African enslaved figure in Europe. Although enslaved people in Batavia were not typically traded beyond the Southeast Asian network, the climate of the global slave trade likely contributed to the covetable and fashionable nature of the practice in the Dutch colonies. The advent of the Dutch slave trade in Africa the late sixteenth century generated contemporary attention to and excitement surrounding the economic possibilities of this new commodity.

Positive attention to slavery under the VOC perpetuated in the Republic, particularly as seen through Calvinist minister Godefridus Udeman’s ‘t Geestelyck Roer van’t Coopmans schip (The

Spiritual Rudder of the Merchant Ship).68 Here, Udeman rationalizes the enslavement of those from the Indian archipelago and defends the missions of Dutch trading companies as morally justifiable war against Iberian imperialism.69 Apart from the obvious benefits of free labor, the

67 Susanah Shaw Romney, New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth- Century America, (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2015).

68 The second edition was published in 1640.

69 Hochstrasser, Still Life, 114.

33 slave trade was additionally favored for its contribution to the advancement of the Dutch global mission against fellow European trade powers. On a smaller scale, the slave trade allowed Dutch colonizers to capitalize upon the “inferior” indigenous minorities by redirecting their labor for personal and collective advancement.

Enslaved indigenous people occupied a contested, and often unstable, position in

Batavian society. The pajong-bearer might have served the Martensen family for his entire life, or might have been sold or exchanged between families or inherited by relatives. It is also possible that the Martensens freed him, for Dutch patriarchs appear to have liberated enslaved persons regularly.70 Liberated individuals proceeded to live and work independently in the

Batavian marketplace. Other enslaved indigenous people fled their captivity and attempted, sometimes successfully, to return to their place of origin, which was often far from Java.

Paradoxically, indigenous men who had been freed or absconded from their posts also joined the service of the VOC in large numbers, mostly for the benefit of better pay, rations and social standing.71 Their skills, particularly in terms of knowledge of the land and seascape, were welcomed and cultivated. It appears that while most of the indigenous population in Batavia would have been enslaved at some point in their lives, most would also live to experience freedom. The extent of this freedom was certainly relative, as the social status and economic opportunities for indigenous communities was regulated and restrictive. The pajong-bearer gives a face to the enslaved indigenous minorities of Dutch Batavia whose labor was exploited for the advancement of the colonial city.

70 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 201

71 One notable example of this is the story of Oentoeng, an enslaved male who served as the pajong bearer for Pieter Cnoll’s family, whose portrait by Jacob Coeman is discussed later in this chapter. Oentoeng absconded from Cnoll’s son Cornelius and served in the Company for a short term until he eventually deserted (Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 201).

The position of the pajong-bearer and Chinese trade objects before the city skyline of

Batavia call into question the literal implementation of the segregated social hierarchy through city planning. Tasked with the management of the respective advantages and challenges of the indigenous and Chinese populations, the VOC required a means for fixed structural organization.

Deliberate urban planning, the grand view of which would have been striking from the view of arriving ships, allowed the VOC to both emphasize the superiority of Dutch colonial culture and to physically regulate and separate the distinct minority communities. The VOC constructed the buildings and city plan of Batavia in the style of major Dutch cities. From its canals to its Dutch façades, contemporary writers describe the city as an architectural derivative of Amsterdam.

Frick provided this favorable assessment of Batavia in 1631:

As for Batavia, the city and castle are as well worth a description as they are a man’s sight: And truly mine was ravished with it, for I must confess, that I think them yet finer even than Amsterdam itself. It is five or six miles in compass. The River Jacatra [sic] runs through most streets of the town and almost encompasses it. Upon these canals the inhabitants have the conveniency of going in boats to their gardens and pleasure houses. The sides of them is wall’d up with good square stone, and all along each side of it, there goes a row or two of fine cedar, coco, or fig trees, where the freemen used to walk at night under a most pleasant shade.72

Apart from the tropical flora and orientalized “pleasure houses,” which were tantalizing in their own right, Batavia impressed European visitors with its remarkable resemblance to a “true”

Dutch city. Traces of architectural legacies of other minority communities were incorporated yet ultimately overshadowed by the Dutch style. Batavia encompassed the ultimate objective of a colonial empire abroad, which in many ways outshone the original models in Europe.

Although architecturally and politically Dutch, the urban layout of Batavia mediated between Dutch and Chinese infrastructures and mitigated potential conflict. The city, like those

72 Fayle, Voyages to the East Indies, 33.

35 in both the Dutch Republic and China, was organized with a distinct inner district for government and commerce and outer neighborhoods for public residency. These neighborhoods, as we will see, were separated and stratified according to the colonial social hierarchy. Public institutions common for both Dutch and Chinese, including social clubs, orphanages, homes for the elderly, and hospitals, were gradually and easily established.73 The majority of these served a variety of Batavian citizens and visitors, although some were exclusive to European use.

Institutional commonalities formed a bridge between the Dutch and Chinese and effectively reduced the potential for displeasure by the latter in the wake of colonial development. This early social hybridism, the subtlety of which would not have outwardly appeared as such, set the stage for subsequent compromises throughout the diplomatic development and government of the colonial city.

In terms of political organization, minority communities were confined and organized in

Batavia by an institutional grid. Chinese homes were clustered together and spread in small sections throughout the city, but indigenous communities were majority pushed to the unplanned outer fringes.74 These minority factions were governed by their own leaders and largely retained individual identity in terms of religion, customs and clothing, although all were ultimately responsive to the overarching VOC administration.75 This segregated city plan modeled those in the Dutch Republic where citizens were divided into religious, ethnic, or industrial sections. The division of these communities reduced opportunities for unification and resistance against the

VOC and perpetuated the socio-economic hierarchy that ultimately sustained the impoverished condition of the Javanese. By exacerbating the heterogeneity of Batavia through separated

73 Blussé, Strange Company, 79.

74 Blussé, Strange Company, 18.

75 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 100.

36 neighborhoods, the Dutch ensured the reliance of these smaller communities upon a greater governing power. Non-Dutch minority groups were made to feel that they were both outsiders to and complacent citizens within an architecturally Dutch city.

Despite this systematic segregation and hierarchization, the unprecedented cultural mixing fostered within the Batavian marketplace ultimately resulted in the emergence of a mixed-race generation. The pajong-bearer does not appear to fall within this category, but the contemporary reception to mixed-race individuals illuminates the negative perception of indigenous people that perpetuated social hierarchization. The disproportionality of Dutch men to women in the VOC colonies resulted in marriages between Dutch husbands and indigenous,

Japanese or Chinese wives, which subsequently resulted in a generation of mixed-race children.76

The mixed cultural backgrounds of these families prompted collective societal negotiation of superior and inferior, European and Asian, in subsequent negotiations of language, cuisine, attire, and religion. Dutch-Javanese children in particular present a compelling complication to the Batavian social hierarchy and underscore the perceived inferiority of the indigenous

Javanese. In Batavia, the heterogeneous community was unique and distinct from those in the

Dutch Republic, WIC trading ports, and even other VOC ports in Southeast Asia. As generations passed, families of mixed heritage, many of whom are documented in surviving portraiture, became more and more common. As described by Ann Laura Stoler, the generation of mixed- race children were vastly considered within the European imagination as the embodiment of

European degeneration and moral decay.77 Children of Dutch fathers and indigenous mothers

76 For discussion of the contemporary reception of mixed-race individuals, mainly women, in Dutch Batavian society, see Leonard Blussé, “The Caryatids of the Seventeenth-Century Batavia: Reproduction, Religion and Acculturation under the VOC” in Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1986), 156-172.

77 Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 80.

37 represented “both the supplement to the empire and its excess,” existing as a reminder of white

European sexual transgressions and dangers of subaltern class.78 Although indigenous language and cuisine were often evident in the home, Dutch heritage was paramount. Portraits of families with indigenous or mixed-race wives and Dutch husbands, such as Andries Beeckman’s Het

Kasteel van Batavia, confirm the normalization of mixed families. Yet allegiance to Dutch heritage over the indigenous, which served as the ultimate form of social currency, remained paramount.

The relatively elevated position of Dutch-Chinese and Dutch-Japanese families, however, further underscores the crucial position of these wealthy communities for Dutch trade, the inferiority of the indigenous Javanese, and the centrality of social performance. This is particularly evident in J.J. Coeman’s 1664-65 portrait of the Cnolls (Figure 6), a Dutch-Japanese family who lived in Batavia and whom Coeman painted while living there for several years. The work represents Pieter Cnoll, first Senior Merchant in Batavia, with his wife Cornelia van

Nijenrode and daughters Catherina, who poses with the fan and dog, and Hester, who holds an ivory box.79 Cornelia was born in Japan in 1629 to a Dutch father and Japanese mother. She moved to Batavia in 1637 and married Pieter Cnoll in 1652. Visual evidence clarifies that

Coeman depicted the Cnoll family through Dutch pictorial conventions that elevated them among groups in Batavia: he purposefully elided the Japanese heritage of Cornelia and the children that she and Pieter produced. Cornelia’s almond-shaped eyes and dark hair are overwhelmed by her fair skin and delicate features. She and her family wear luxurious and

78 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 94.

79 “Pieter Cnoll, Cornelia van Nijenrode and their daughters, Jacob Coeman, 1665,” Rijksmuseum, accessed January 29, 2020, https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/SK-A-4062.

38 fashionable European attire, complete with jewels, lace and gold embellishments.80 The opulence of the leisurely outdoor setting is marked by the white columns, small dog, and flower arrangements in the style of Dutch still-life painting. As an additional indication of the family’s status, two indigenous Javanese servants stand in shadows in the right middle ground. The woman, whose hair is pulled into a tight bun, wears a traditional wrapped skirt and white blouse and carries a basket of tropical fruit. The man, who handles an orange, sports European pantaloons, tights and flowing hair. In juxtaposition with their servants, the mixed Japanese and

Dutch ethnicity of the Cnoll family is posited as clearly superior to that of the indigenous

Javanese. As Jean Gelman Taylor asserted, mixed families could yield great social power: through the appropriation European ways and ownership of Dutch objects, they could become

European.81 The Cnolls did just this by repressing Cornelia van Nijenrode’s Japanese heritage and performing the role of Dutch elite through fashion and customs. Their employment of

Javanese servants secured their membership to the Dutch ruling class and solidified the repression of the indigenous community. Coeman’s painting reveals the centrality of social performance in Dutch Batavia for the stratification of the social hierarchy.

Dutch repression and appropriation of indigenous people and their culture functioned as a deliberate mediation of the social stratification and emerging cultural hybridity that ultimately proved difficult to govern. In the face of anxieties surrounding the retention of administrative control over the heterogeneous city, the pajong-bearer provided an opportunity to respond to demands for universally legible status symbols with particular immediacy. The management and subordination of the indigenous population of Batavia through servitude arose in response to the

80 Similar to the legal regulation of pajong-bearers, the display of excessive finery would be outlawed by the 1680 sumptuary codes. The women’s pearls and Pieter’s gold buckles were two specifically discouraged items (Kehoe, Dutch Batavia, 3).

81 Jean Gelman Taylor, “Painted Ladies of the VOC,” South African Historical Journal 59 (2007): 62.

39 economic threat of the powerful yet largely uncooperative Chinese, the relationship with whom required a balance of diplomatic exactitude and the independent growth of the Dutch network in

Asia. Capitalization upon indigenous manpower allowed the VOC to strengthen the Batavian infrastructure and perform their administrative role. The pajong-bearer in Cuyp’s VOC Senior

Merchant, his Wife and Manservant thereby carried situationally specific visual and political significance for Dutch viewers both in Batavia and the Republic, as discussed further in the next chapter.

CHAPTER 2

VISUALIZING THE FUTURE OF DUTCH COLONIALISM THROUGH THE

EUROPEANIZED PAJONG-BEARER

As discussed in the previous chapter, the need to ensure a stable social hierarchy, and to convey that stability through visual imagery, was exacerbated in response to the Chinese, whose economic and social position in Batavia were both crucial and threatening to the Dutch hold on

Southeast Asian territory. This illusion of Dutch stability is emphasized further by the hierarchical relationship between the pajong-bearer and the Martensens, who are portrayed in a unified marital relationship. The painting, which Cuyp likely completed in Dordrecht upon the

Martensens’ return from Batavia in 1641, expressed to audiences in the Dutch Republic a favorable perspective both of the socioeconomic and marital statuses of the couple and of trade under the VOC. Despite Cuyp’s reliance upon contemporary visual material to invent the harbor scene, the painting realistically exposes the cultural appropriation and indigenous exploitation that propelled colonialist methods of domination. The characteristically Dutch couple, who are portrayed through pictorial conventions for companionate marriage, are positioned together against the landscape and pajong-bearer in order to emphasize an idealized view of the shared colonial mission and cultural homogeneity of the Dutch abroad. Through his depiction as both a mirror and foil to the Dutch officer, the pajong-bearer elevates the status of the couple by emphasizing their Dutch identity and participation in imperialist projects. The Europeanized indigenous body amidst symbols of maritime prowess and flourishing trade with Asia collectively project an optimistic view of economic and colonial achievements under the VOC.

Commemorative Significance and Conflation of Historical Moments

Cuyp’s portrait of the Martensens consolidates the events of 1640 and 1641 into a singular image. Jacob Martensen was not the original commander of the depicted fleet, but rather gained control after the untimely death of the original commander, Barend Pietersz Grotenbroek, near the Cape of Good Hope in 1641. From there, Martensen directed the ships back to the Dutch

Republic where he was financially awarded for his efforts.82 In light of the transition of commandorial power at sea, it is clear that the portrayal of Martensen’s authority in the harbor of

Batavia is embellished. Although he served as commander for a substantial portion of the voyage to the Netherlands, Martensen never assumed responsibility for the entire fleet as suggested by the pointed gesture of his rattan cane in his portrait. It is reasonable to conclude that, after successfully navigating the fleet home from the Cape of Good Hope, Martensen not only wished to celebrate this feat but also to memorialize his time in Batavia. The portrayal of the couple in clothing typical of Protestants in the Republic who pose before their fleet and the colonial city skyline conflates three distinct moments. The Martensens are simultaneously represented in

Southeast Asia, as well as in the moment of responsibility for the fleet in the second portion of the voyage home, as well as dressed in black wool attire that would have been worn in the

Republic. The image thereby emphasizes the most important aspects of the Martensens’ identity—Dutch austerity, maritime prowess, and participation in global trade in Southeast

Asia—within a singular frame.

As evident by the terminus of Jacob Martensen’s rattan cane, the largest ships of the fleet, which proudly fly Dutch flags, are of primary importance to the depicted landscape and to the shaping of the painting’s visual assertions to Dutch primacy. It is likely that the ship in the

82 Zandvliet, The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 181-2.

42 foreground is the Salamander, a well-known retourship or homeward-bounder, which made six return journeys between 1640 and 1661.83 Homeward-bounders were large vessels built specifically to bring substantial quantities of products back to the Dutch Republic. The smaller ships in the left side of the bay that resemble the two largest homeward-bounders are likely jachten, which were used for transport between Asian ports and did not travel to the Dutch

Republic. Historical sources indicate that jachten also operated within military contexts, although specially designed man-of-war ships more often fulfilled this purpose.84 In an echo of the nautical elements, the pajong’s ribbons ripple in the wind and, like the billowing Dutch flags, indicate ideal weather conditions for sailing. In his support of the officer and integration within the performative VOC identity, the pajong-bearer represents the obligation of the indigenous

Javanese to support the Dutch maritime and trade operations. Martensens’ prideful gesture to the two homeward-bounders indicates his responsibility both of their contents and of their successful return trip to the Netherlands, the near failure of which was mitigated by his leadership.

Although Cuyp did not travel to Batavia, it would have been relatively easy for him to generate his artistic representation of the harbor from various works on paper to which he likely had access. However, few contemporary artists marginalized indigenous people and aggrandized the Dutch in such a specific representational manner as Cuyp. Maps, sketches and prints by VOC artists and travelers to the Southeast Asian colonies circulated throughout the Dutch Republic and provided local audiences with second-hand perspectives on the organization of port cities and living conditions of their residents. Early texts, such as Willem Lodewijcksz’s De Eerst

Schipvaart der Nederlanders naar Oost-Indie under Cornelis de Houtman 1595-1597 (1598),

83 Robert Parthesius, Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: the Development of the Dutch East India (VOC) Shipping Network in Asia 1595-1660 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010): 66.

84 Parthesius, Dutch Ships, 69.

43 provided some of the first images of the Dutch and Portuguese in Southeast Asia.85 Several of the images printed therein reflected the Dutch fascination with, even initial offense to, the pompous use of pajong-bearers by the Portuguese in public discussed later in this chapter. Others portrayed indigenous people attacking Dutch ships, which caused a large number of Dutch casualties in the early years of the pepper trade.86 One of the prints from the text, Bazar ofte groote merckt tot Bantam (Bazaar or great market of Bantam) (1598) (Figure 7), illustrates a lively bazaar in Bantam much like Adries Beeckman’s Het Kasteel van Batavia. The image features row upon row of market stalls, towering palm trees, indigenous rowboats, and

Portuguese traders followed by pajong-bearers. A later example, Julius Milheuser’s prints in

Gezicht opt Batavia (1619/1680), published by Johannes de Ram in Amsterdam, portrayed panoramic views of Batavia from an off-shore perspective in the harbor. The two center leafs depict Batavia Fort surrounded by bastions with VOC ships dotted across the water (Figure 8).

The irregular profile of Mount Gede rises above the city’s horizon line, the composition of which is repeated in Cuyp’s cityscape. Prints of the natural and constructed landscape of Batavia provided a visual reference for artists in the Dutch Republic. Symbols commonly associated with

Southeast Asia, such as the palm tree, dark-skinned servant, pajong, and orange tree, were often included in these prints and were perpetuated in subsequent images as further indications of setting.

As further evidence for the situationality of Cuyp’s painting, the leafy plants that sprout along the picture plane would have resonated in relation to shifting conceptions of nature during the age of European maritime travel. The image carries associations to these discussions and

85 The prints, of which the original artist is unknown, were included in Lodewijksz’s description of the voyage undertaken by Cornelis Houtman in 1595-7, printed in Amsterdam in 1598 (Hoschstrasser, Still Life, 102).

86 Hoschstrasser, Still Life, 102.

44 would have invited reflection into the relationship between humans and nature, which evidently gained new meaning through European curiosity with the cuisine and homeopathic remedies of less “civilized” cultures. During this time, the relationship between humans and nature became more complicated: there developed an awareness that humans could radically alter their physical surroundings, as well as an attachment of new social significance to tropical and oceanic botanicals.87 The search for Eden within newly colonized tropical “paradises” began in the fifteenth century, mainly centered upon the Cape of Good Hope.88 The subsequent colonialist encounter with India, Africa and the Americas lead to a far more complex conceptualization of the European “Eden,” which appeared limitless rather than specific. In tandem with this Edenic island discourse developed an acute awareness of the precarity of nature and threat of the economic demands of colonization. The Dutch in particular mitigated this by working closely with indigenous healers to accrue knowledge of the cultivation and uses of plants. VOC medicinal botanists such as Hendrik van Reede documented and classified Southeast Asian plants with empirical exactitude and circulated this information throughout the Company and the

Dutch Republic. In his lauded text Hortus malabaricus, which was printed in Amsterdam in twelve volumes between 1678 and 1693, van Reede characterized the rich vegetation of Malabar

(Southwest India) as a moderator of the rocky landscape:

Every land and field extending into the plains abounded so much with plants and trees of every kind, (as have said of the above forests), and radiated such fertility, that indeed every piece seemed to have been cultivated by the careful hand of some gardener and planted in a very elegant order. Indeed even the pools, and one may wonder about this, the marshes, nay the very borders of the rivers which carried salt water displayed several plants with which

87 Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 24.

88 Grove, Green Imperialism, 5.

they were completely covered. There was no place, not even the smallest, which did not display some plants.89

As perpetuated by VOC botany texts, tropical plants were considered synonymous with the

Southeast Asian landscape and corroborated Cuyp’s setting in Batavia. With van Reede’s rich tropical flora in mind, Cuyp’s depiction of the cultivated yet imperfect leafy plants falls in line with contemporary conceptualizations of the Southeast Asian natural landscape. Their green prongs extend outward with vivacity despite their proximity to the salt water bay and well- trodden foot path. Each plant is distinct in shape and color, yet their similarity in size and position in a row convey a sense of deliberate cultivation. Although the identification of the plants is currently unknown and may be the product of the artist’s imagination, a Dutch audience would have been predisposed to projecting upon them a medicinal or otherwise practical purpose.

Deciphering the Implications of the Pajong

Similar to the situational significance of the flora, the pajong and pajong-bearer symbolically locate the Martensens in Batavia and amplify their position within the colonial space. The pajong-bearer enhances the perceived authenticity of this image through specificity, which would have been crucial for Cuyp who never visited the city himself. Cuyp would have drawn inspiration from European prints of pajong-bearers within indigenous, Portuguese, and

Dutch contexts.

Despite discrepancies between cultural manifestations, all seventeenth-century printed images of pajong-bearers perpetuate similar formal elements and compositional arrangements.

Early prints convey the motif of the pajong as integral to the social landscape of Southeast Asia.

89 Hendrik van Reede tot Drakenstein, Horticus indicus malabaricus, continens regioni malabarici apud Indos celeberrini onmis generis plantas rariores, 12 vols (Amsterdam: 1678-93). Cited by Grove on page 86.

A few such works, including De gouverneur (Ki Patih) en de opper-Sjaich (Kali) van Bantam,

1596 (1596-7 and/or 1646) (Figure 9), which was published in the Northern Netherlands, depict the indigenous use of the pajong for political and religious leaders. Although presumably made from the observations of a European visitor, the figures in the etching are exclusively indigenous.

Two ribbed pajongs, one folded and one opened, cover governor Ki Patih and Supreme Shayich

Kali who wear distinct hats and sit cross-legged among their male attendants. Images depicting indigenous pajong use are relatively rare. Most convey the translation of the social symbol among the Dutch and Portuguese, whose presence in Asia is confirmed nearly a century prior to the arrival of the Dutch and who were using pajong-bearers in large numbers by the beginning of the seventeenth century. Dutch Protestant traders initially reacted critically toward Portuguese adoption of the pajong, which they viewed as pompous and improper. One of the first Dutch visitors to witness Portuguese Goa, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, His Itinerario of 1579-92, first published in 1596, appears to provide some of the earliest illustrations of Southeast Asian botanicals, indigenous people, and European trade ports.90 Linschoten writes in 1596:

The Portuguese, mestizos [individuals of mixed-race], and Christians keep noble and very magnificent houses; they commonly have (as have been mentioned) five, six, ten, twenty, sometimes more or fewer slaves both male and female in their service, each according to his state and quality…91

For the Portuguese in particular, Linschoten was confounded by their public personas, which he describes with distaste: “[The Portuguese go] along the street very slowly, and with great haughtiness and inflated pomp, with a slave who carries a great hood or canopy in front and

90 Hoschstrasser, “Still Life,” 110.

91 Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Interario: Voyage ofte Schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten naer oost ofte Portugaels Indien, 1579-1592, Hendrik Kern and Heert Terpestra eds. Werken vitgegeven door de Linschoten- Vereniging, II (The Hauge, Martinus Nijhoff, 1910), 132.

47 above the head, so that the sun or rain cannot touch him.”92 Linschoten, like other early Dutch traders, was astonished by the metamorphosis of social performance in Southeast Asia that created sharp dissonance with European norms.

Early prints of pajongs produced in the Dutch Republic typically echo this description of

Portuguese traders who are depicted parading about Asian ports in ostentatious attire with pajong-bearers in tow. One notable engraving reproduced by Lodewijcksz from the travelogue of

Cornelis de Houtman, who traveled to Southeast Asia from 1595 to 1597, depicts two mixed- race Portuguese individuals in Java with their pajong-bearers. Lodewijcksz included with the image a description of the manner of the Portuguese in Southeast Asia and explicitly mentions

“their slaves going after them, carrying the parasol over their heads, through which they are protected against the heat of the sun.”93 Distinct from the embroidered golden pajong belonging to the Martensens, the Portuguese pajongs are relatively simple with thin poles, pleated fabric, and scalloped detailing along the edges. The elevated social position of the Portuguese mixed- race men, as indicated by the service of their pajong-bearers and fine clothing, underscore the widespread implementation of luxury social symbols beyond the typical upper class of white

Europeans. Prints such as Lodewijcksz’s provide insight both into early social performance by

Europeans in the Asian territories, as well as to the complicated web of cultural hybridity that manifested both in interracial offspring and appropriation of indigenous social symbols.

Images such as that of the Martensens confirm that, by the early decades of the seventeenth century, the Dutch had abandoned reservations about the pajong’s association with moral indecency and adapted it for quotidien use. Indeed, despite their reputation for modest

92 Jan Huygen van Linschoten, Interario: Voyage ofte Schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten naer oost ofte Portugaels Indien, 1579-1592, vol. 1. Hendrik Kern and Heert Terpestra, ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff), 132. 93 Houtman, 1915, 126.

48 lifestyle, the Dutch were quick to adopt the very same displays of status they originally found off-putting. Among the Dutch and Portuguese colonizers and indigenous communities alike, the pajong functioned as a ubiquitous status symbol across European trade ports in Southeast Asia.94

As discussed previously in regard to trade, the Dutch reacted competitively to the Portuguese’s successful trade networks and diplomatic relationships. The Dutch adoption of pajong-bearers may testify to similar competitive motivations in both the economic and social arenas.

The Man behind the Pajong-Bearer?

As presented in the introduction, the pajong-bearer in Cuyp’s painting differs from other portrayals of similar figures through his ballooned trousers, tights, buttoned trousers, and ribboned accessories. He is thereby Europeanized through his position in relation to the Dutch enslavers, as well as by his attire that both echoes European court costume and mirrors that of

Jacob Martensen. The fact that the Martensens are portrayed as owning a pajong-bearer, particularly one that is deliberately Europeanized, indicates their desire to enhance perceptions both of their social standing in Batavia and their self-concept as contributors to the civilization of indigenous people through the promotion of Dutch culture. On one hand, the pajong-bearer’s servanthood was legible to contemporaneous audiences of the painting as a direct reflection of the social status of the enslavers. On the other hand, the depiction of his race exacerbates his allure and exotic value within the European context, particularly in reference to contemporary court portraiture. The practice of depicting European nobility posing with objectified servants of color dates to the early Renaissance, namely with Titian’s Portrait of Laura Eustochia and the

94 Kehoe, “Dutch Batavia,” 7.

49 pictorial convention that it initiated (Figure 10).95 Like the enslaved black Africans of the

European courts, the Javanese figure’s attire falls within the tradition of court costume, with fine materials and precious adornments. Although often similar in style to the clothing of the

European figures, bright colors and stripes underscore the servants’ racial and societal

“otherness.”96 As discerned from contemporary paintings and prints, it appears that pajong- bearers and other servants in Batavia wore tunics and often walked shoeless. The materials used in traditional European court attire would have presumably been costly to procure in the

Southeast Asian colonies and impractically hot for the tropical climate. The Europeanization of the pajong-bearer’s costume distances him from the actual experience of servanthood in Batavia and incorporates him within the pictorial tradition of black and brown servants in the European courts.

The specificity of the pajong-bearer’s facial features could indicate that he is modeled after an actual sitter, although it is also possible that Cuyp rendered him as a generalized figure informed by contemporary printed material to which he had access. Regardless of origin, it is important to recognize that the pajong-bearer is not generalized in the same negative stereotypical manner as, say, Eckhout’s Chinese vendor. Unless new information comes to light surrounding the painting’s patronage or artist’s working methods, it may never be known if Cuyp based the pajong-bearer’s visage on an actual sitter. Regardless, the imperialist significance remains the same: the importance of the pajong-bearer lies within his representation of the

95 For more on the significance and legacy of Titian’s portraits of black African servants, see the following three articles: Jane Fair Bestor, "Titian's Portrait of Laura Eustochia: The Decorum of Female Beauty and the Motif of the Black Page," Renaissance Studies 17, no. 4 (2003); Kate Lowe, “Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 66, no. 2 (June 1, 2013); and Peter Erickson, “Invisibility Speaks: Servants and Portraits in Early Modern Visual Culture,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2009).

96 For more on the significance of stripes as an indicator of “otherness,” specifically in Renaissance Venice, see Kate Lowe, “Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 66, no. 2 (June 1, 2013): 444-5.

50 broader community of indigenous minorities in Dutch Batavia and not within his relative individuality.

Uncertainty surrounding the potentially discernable identity of the pajong-bearer derives in part from the specificity of his facial physiognomy, which is comparable to those of the

European figures in the painting. The portraits of the Martensens presumably reflect the actual couple who sat for Cuyp. Although Cuyp provides no identifiable visual evidence for the identity of the pajong-bearer, and no documentary evidence has come to light, his portrayal is equally lifelike. From a formal standpoint, the application of humanizing details to figures that were not modeled from sitters contributes to the cohesiveness of the group portrait and disguises inconsistencies in relative individuality. This is evident in Cuyp’s representations of black pages, the details of which are discussed later in this chapter, who are similarly portrayed with refreshing humanity and detail. Evidence for the presence of black Africans in Europe during the seventeenth century suggests that Cuyp could have based the appearance of these figures on actual people with whom he had come into contact. However, their images may have derived from generalized features of black male children rather than from individual sitters. The portrait- like details within these representations of black servants possibly indicate a level of familiarity or even respect for these racial minorities as integral, albeit repressed, members of European society, which contrasts with the caricatured depictions of Chinese traders discussed in the previous chapter. Regardless of whether the painted pajong-bearer or black servants are based on individual sitters, Cuyp constructed their humanity and ethnic specificity through realistic, familiar physical features that would have reflected the contemporary social concerns of his white European audience.

Evidence from other non-European figures in contemporary works indicate that artists constructed the appearance of individuality through the enhancement of realistic features in the face and body. In the case of Peter Paul Rubens’s Man in Korean Costume (c. 1617) (Figure 11), for example, Stephanie Schrader contends that the drawing, although quite specific in physical appearance, represents the artist’s idea of a Korean man rather than a portrait. Seventeenth- century Europeans had little knowledge of the distinctions between the specific physical attributes that might differentiate the Chinese and Korean populations, let alone between the indigenous Javanese and other indigenous Southeast Asians.97 Contemporary physiognomic stereotypes for Asian people, including high cheekbones, flat noses, arched eyebrows, and almond-shaped eyes, were perpetuated in written and illustrated accounts from Ricci and Johann

Theodor de Bry, both of which were owned by Rubens.98 Rubens used red chalk on the to the cheeks, ears and lips of the figure, while placing as well as emphasis upon the confrontational forward gaze, in order to animate the stereotypes of Asian facial features and provide a sense of lifelike individuality.99 Although some historians argue that Rubens rendered the figure in generalized ways that suggest anonymity, Schrader’s assessment of Rubens’s deliberately humanizing techniques illuminates the practice of artistic extrapolation from pseudo- ethnographic images.100 Pseudo-ethnographic descriptions of Asian men had begun to circulate

97 Stephanie Schrader, “Implicit Understanding: Rubens and the Representation of the Jesuit Missions in Asia” in Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia, ed. Stephanie Schrader (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013), 54. As mentioned in the introduction to my first chapter, it is clear that the Dutch actively differentiated between the Chinese and Javanese in order to construct their hierarchical colonial society.

98 Schrader, “Implicit Understanding,” 54.

99 Schrader, “Implicit Understanding,” 54.

100 Ji identified the unnamed Korean mentioned in two letters written to the VOC governor-general of Batavia in Februrary 1628 as the “Joseon Man,” after the Joseon Dynasty that ruled the kingdom of Korea from 1392 to 1910. According to the letters, the “Joseon Man” served as an attendant and translator for the Dutch merchant Jacques Specx. The two apparently traveled together to Zeeland, which would have put the “Joseon Man” in close proximity to Rubens’s native Antwerp. Schrader challenges this interpretation by noting that the explicit evidence in the VOC

52 around the Dutch Republic beginning with the Jesuit missions in China in the early seventeenth century, the style of which emphasizes specific details of appearance and dress with a degree of scientific exactitude that artists in Europe could then adapt within their own work.101 Illustrations by Wouter Schouten, which are discussed later in this chapter, exemplify a similar practice of documentation of the indigenous Javanese that could be appropriated by European artists. Artists including Rubens clearly sought to produce individualized representations of unfamiliar people and places and did so by incorporating stereotypical descriptions within advanced portraiture technique. Therefore, Cuyp may have employed similar portrait-like details in order to enhance the individuality of the pajong-bearer.

If the pajong-bearer is indeed an invented figure like Rubens’s Man in Korean Costume, then the decision by Cuyp and the presumed patrons, the Martensens, to include this figure and the implications he carries were unquestionably deliberate. Evidence that enslaved indigenous persons traveled with their Dutch enslavers back to the Republic is scarce: it cannot be confirmed if the Martensens brought the pajong-bearer with them on their return voyage, let alone if they ever actually employed a pajong-bearer in the first place. Rather, the inclusion of this particular figure enhances the immediate social significance and historical resonance of the image for Dutch audiences in the Republic. Printed depictions of Javanese figures, beginning with the aforementioned text by Willem Lodewijcksz, rely upon costume and action rather than physiognomic qualities to convey identity. For example, the print Javanese Dance, which was originally printed by Lodewijcksz and reproduced by Houtman, portrays nine Javanese figures

correspondences is scarce and that there is no confirmation that Rubens ever met the “Joseon Man.” (Stephanie Schrader, “The Many Identities of Rubens’s Man in Korean Costume: New Perspectives on Old Interpretations” in Schrader, Looking East, 9-10).

101 Dawn Odell, “Clothing, Customs and Mercantilism: Dutch and Chinese Ethnographies in the Seventeenth Century,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 53 no. 1 (2002).

53 who wear traditional wrapped robes and Portuguese-style hats and dance to a xylophone player in symmetrical formations that would have been understood as distinct from European practices

(Figure 12). While the context of the publication indicates that the figures are Javanese, their bodies and faces are nearly identical regardless of gender. Ink sketches by VOC surgeon Wouter

Schouten, best remembered for his famed Oost-Indische Voyagie (1676), provide some of the earliest physiognomic depictions of Chinese and Javanese. His crowded sketchbook pages feature Javanese parades (Figure 13), merchants carrying their wares (Figure 14), and Chinese and Javanese men dining together (Figure 15). While the activities and movements of the bodies are situational and specific, the figures, apart from the almond-shaped eyes and hair buns of the

Chinese, remain relatively generalized. Beyond contemporary prints, it is unlikely that Cuyp had many, if any, first-hand interactions with Javanese individuals. Indigenous Southeast Asians were not trafficked to the Dutch Republic in the same numbers as Western Africans in the Dutch slave trade. It is therefore likely that Cuyp primarily relied on the information from prints and physical descriptions, without straying into territories of caricature, in order to construct his pajong-bearer as realistically as possible.

As further evidence for the invention of the pajong-bearer, Cuyp similarly constructed the appearance of humanized individuality for his unspecified Dutch male peasant figures. In the examples of young men, Cuyp typically portrayed his figures with long and wispy hair, rounded cheeks, and lightly grown mustaches. The servant in the unusual composition Groom with Horse and Half-Hidden Horseman (Figure 16) shares nearly all of his physical qualities with the pajong-bearer, apart from his rosy white skin. His face is similarly fleshy and framed with wavy locks. He stands with his ankles together and feet turned outward, an unstable stance that, as we will see, underscores the servants’ instability and potential disruptiveness. Although Cuyp only

54 depicted one pajong-bearer, nearly all of the servants he portrayed in his works carry objects essential to their service. Most hold the horses’ reins in Cuyp’s numerous equestrian portraits.

Some hold similarly oblong items, such as the shepherd in River Landscape with Riders (1655) who grasps his staff at an angle that resembles that of the pajong pole (Figure 17). Where the enslaved Javanese man differs from these figures is that his skin is dark and he lacks a hat, which was symbolic of Dutch masculinity and bodily autonomy. The alignment of the pajong-bearer with pictorial conventions for white European enslaved boys enhances the perception of his

Europeanization. In both instances, this aspect of constructed humanity contributes to the

“othering” of these figures who are paradoxically marginalized in society yet centralized, albeit anonymously, within the paintings.

While the pajong-bearer is the only known example of a Southeast Asian servant from

Cuyp’s oeuvre, his depictions of black African boys reflect similar compositional strategies that illuminate the perception of non-white minorities in Europe as socially disruptive and incongruous. Peter Erikson describes a period of generalized cultural uneasiness toward blacks in white European society during the Renaissance period that preceded the fully conscious critical perspective of race in later centuries.102 While most examples of black people in early modern art, such as those within Rubens’s oeuvre, fall within the former category of nascent interrogation of racial difference, there exist some early exceptions in which racial unease becomes tangible. Erikson specifically analyzes the black male servant figure in Frans Hals’s

Family Group in a Landscape (c. 1645-8) (Figure 18), whose somber facial expression differentiates from the family’s unified expressions of contentment and produces a “deliberate

102 Peter Erikson, “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,” Criticism: a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 35, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 515.

55 disruptive asymmetry.”103 He stands between the mother and daughter, which awkwardly divides the family into two unequal sections. Further, the off-centered position of the family ensemble places the black boy at the center and draws attention to his dejected expression. According to

Erikson, the black boy’s walking staff exacerbates his perceived social threat: canes and staffs originated with the kings of late feudal Europe, so the use of such an implement by a servant would suggest a challenge to the social hierarchy.104 The family’s male child similarly holds a walking stick but one of apparently lesser quality and smaller size. Erikson contends that the level of discomfort in this image, which is strikingly distinct from contemporary images, appears to be an intentional artistic effect. Through this example, it is clear that paintings of blacks and other racial minorities in European society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could both reflect the contemporary social hierarchy as well as expose emerging anxieties surrounding the position of racial “others” within a predominantly white society.

In comparison of Hals’s painting with Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant, it is clear that the pajong-bearer engages with racial anxieties by his passive and Europeanized status. The groups of figures stand off-centered in both compositions and deeply recessed landscapes in both paintings similarly break away from the foliage in the foreground along the axes of the farthest- right figures. Hals’s black servant stands at the center of the family and makes direct and confrontational eye contact that underscores his subversiveness. By contrast, the pajong-bearer is pushed to the margins of the figural group and his gaze is directed toward Jacob Martensen rather than the viewer. His perceived threat to the social order is therefore less obvious, but nonetheless present. The black servant’s angled walking stick, which extends to the eye-level of

103 Erikson, “Representations of Blacks,” 515.

104 Julius Held, “Le Roi à la Ciasse,” The Art Bulletin 1 (June 1958), cited by Erikson in “Representations of Blacks,” 515.

56 his enslavers, physically resembles the pajong pole. The historical connotations of the pajong differ from the walking stick in that the pajong is traditionally carried by the socially inferior and the walking stick by the socially superior. The pajong thereby fixes the social hierarchy rather than disrupts it. However, the Europeanization of the pajong-bearer’s attire and appearance paradoxically elevates his position as a member of European society. His status is left in flux, much like the figure in Hals’s painting. Although the conclusions surrounding the relative reflections of racial anxieties in the two images differ, the intentional artistic effects are comparable. Just as Hals depicted the black servant in a central and confrontational position,

Cuyp deliberately placed the pajong-bearer behind the Martensens in a position of apparent obedience and loyalty. With this portrait, Cuyp’s concerns with the position of non-white minorities within white European society are generally more supportive of the existing hierarchy, but the underlying sense of criticism and anxiety as expressed through the pajong-bearer’s

Europeanization remains. However, in a vein closer to Hals’s composition, Cuyp’s oeuvre includes several examples of prominent yet discordant black figures whose representative qualities allude to senses of precarity or unease surrounding their positions within society. In the notable example of The Negro Page (1652) (Figure 19), the young Black African child occupies the center of the composition and holds the reigns of the horses while the other figures, two

Dutchmen, occupy the right marginal space. The child is visually prioritized through the highlight of the sunbeam upon the left side of his body and through his position as the object of the directed gazes of the animals surrounding him. He wears a court costume of fine fabric similar to that of the pajong-bearer, with bows on his shoes and trousers, white tights, buttons down his front, and a white collar. Standing with the majority of his weight on his right foot and left foot pointed ahead, the African child’s stance is contrived and transitory, much like a ballet

57 dancer en tendu. His wistful gaze extends beyond the edge of the frame, conveying the intention to move beyond the clearing and away from the Dutchmen. By contrast, the substantially larger

Dutch figures assume wide, solid stances with feet shoulder-width apart and weight evenly distributed. Even hidden behind the buttocks of the white horse, the Dutch men are imposing and confident. Although compositionally centralized, the darkness of the African child’s skin undermines his authority by masking any identifiable facial features in shadow. The reflection of the sunlight upon his shaved head is exaggerated, as if his skull were a precious black pearl.

Emphasis upon the blackness of skin in early modern European portraiture underscored the exoticism and preciousness of enslaved black Africans. Similar to Hals’s group portrait, the central yet precarious position of the black page may indicate Cuyp’s nascent anxiety surrounding the position of non-white minorities within hierarchized European society.

In a contemporary example, Cuyp portrays a similarly centralized yet disconnected black

African boy in Huntsmen Halted (c. 1650) (Figure 20). Like The Negro Page, the enslaved figure holds the reigns of the horses, which stand separating him from the three sons of Cornelius van

Beveren.105 The group of figures stand to the left, which places the black figure closer to the center of the composition. He wears Hungarian-style court attire complete with turban, kerchief, and gilded sword.106 His Dutch counterparts are dressed with similar eastern European influence in luxurious fabrics, fur caps, and heeled boots. The African boy stands with his weight over his left foot, with his right toe pointed to the extent that his knee appears to bend inward. Unlike

105 Beveren was a diplomat and wealthy patron of Cuyp’s from Dordrecht.

106As Arthur Wheelock mentions in regards to the Pompe van Meerdervoort hunting portrait, it is possible that Cuyp simply applied costumes such as this in reference to Polish or Eastern background. Hungarian dress, the influence of which is evident in Huntsmen Halted, was the dominant model for fashions of other central European countries and artists often confused this style with other Eastern attire. The Dutch additionally favored the Hungarians for their defense of the Protestant cause. Cuyp utilizes Hungarian attire in several of his figures on horseback, as the Hungarians were celebrated for their equestrian prowess (Arthur K. Wheelock, Aelbert Cuyp (London: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 54).

58 other examples from Cuyp, the closest Dutchman assumes a nearly identical stance of static transience. The crucial difference lies in their respective gazes: the Dutchman looks toward his brothers, engaged in the equestrian tasks, while the enslaved boy gazes with deliberate focus toward a distant point beyond the right edge of the frame. The van Beveren brothers, although off-centered, are integrally connected through physical proximity and mutual engagement, whereas the African figure is visibly centralized yet disengaged from the activity. The black servant in this example may reflect a similar concern with the social hierarchy as reflected in

Hals’s group portrait, but likely aligns more with the pajong-bearer by confirming the existing social hierarchy with visual focus upon non-white servant figures as points of visual interest and historic accuracy.

Congruent with his depictions of the black African boys, Cuyp’s European male servants exemplify similar paradoxes of visual prominence and social inferiority. However, without the aspect of distinct racial difference, these figures tend to be better integrated within the figural groupings than the non-white servants. The red-cloaked boy in Avenue at Meerdevort (c. 1650-

52) (Figure 21), for example, enjoys a comparably central position to the enslaved African in The

Negro Page. Apart from the European servant’s wide brimmed hat, the two figures don similar court costumes complete with bowed shoes and trousers, tights, buttoned and white collared shirt fronts, and fine capes. Both are notably young boys, their smallness of stature emphasized against the stability of the adult male bodies. The circle of cows, dogs, and horses held by their reigns that surround and gaze upon the two boys are nearly identical. The European servant stands upon a shallowly rendered country road whose tree-lined path stretches toward a stone château in the left background. In the deep distance at the right, a harbor filled with large sailed ships rises from the haze. Behind it stretches a city skyline of windmills and a fortress-like

59 cathedral, nearly identical in composition to Cuyp’s depiction of Batavia. The European servant similarly gazes beyond the frame into the distance, his pointed right foot suggestive of physical instability and forward movement. However, the relationship between this servant and the other

Dutch men exposes his greatest distinction from Cuyp’s black African boys. Rather than look in the opposite direction from his enslavers and stand physically separated as if considering escape, the European boy appears to lead the Dutch man on horseback who follows him. His gaze is equally wistful, but the suggestion of motion in his stance and in the raised hoof of the Dutch man’s horse indicate that both figures are united in a common direction. Although distinctly inferior in size and status, the white servant is situated as integral to, rather than disjointed from, the mobility of his enslavers.

The pajong-bearer’s directed gaze visually assigns him to the pictorial group of Cuyp’s white rather than black servants. Apart from the example in Avenue at Meerdevort, nearly all other European boys stare at their employers with intentionality. In one subtly homoerotic example, a servant carries a fish and gazes wide-eyed in the direction of the groin of Pieter de

Roovere on horseback (Figure 22). The servant in Grey Horse in a Landscape who, as previously mentioned, resembles the pajong-bearer, stares behind the horse toward the presumed location of the horseman’s head. The seated figure of the patron is partially blocked behind the belly of the horse, a highly unusual compositional decision. An older, albeit physically diminished, coachman removes his cap and looks upon one of the Pompe van Meerdervoort brothers, who, in an unusual gesture, reciprocates the gaze (Figure 23). The rider raises his whip in a gesture similar to the way in which Jacob Martensen wields his rattan cane, suggesting the forward motion of the group and command to the servant to follow behind. In these examples of white male servants, allegiance and readiness to serve are underscored through their directed

60 gazes. By contrast, the enslaved black Africans are portrayed as disjointed from the white figures through positioning within the paintings, yet compositionally centralized so as to draw attention to these differences.

Like Cuyp’s white servants, the pajong-bearer’s eye contact creates a visual bond with the Martensens and suggests unity in motion. The black African figures in the aforementioned examples are separated from the Dutch figures and gaze away from their counterparts beyond the frame. By contrast, the pajong-bearer appears to use the gaze to engage with his enslaver. His expression is expectant and alert, poised to respond to the next command. The direction of his eye contact draws attention to Jacob Martensen’s pointed gaze toward the viewer and subsequently to the oblong glance from the wife. When viewers reciprocate these arresting gazes, they are implicated within the elevation of the Martensens through attention upon their material wealth and colonial accomplishments. The pajong-bearer demonstrates the appropriate response to the overt demand for recognition and memorialization.

Gender Dynamics

As echoed in the other examples of servants in Cuyp’s oeuvre, the hierarchy of masculinity between the Dutch officer and indigenous pajong-bearer reinforces his subjugation.

The pajong-bearer is portrayed as a pubescent youth: his face is round and free of wrinkles and his moustache has only begun to grow in wispy tufts. The distinct difference in size and stature between Jacob Martensen and the pajong-bearer stresses the physical fortitude and maturity of the white, European officer against the apparent naivité and primitivism of the boyish servant.

Apart from wrinkles and skin tone, Martensen’s facial features strike an eerie resemblance with those of the pajong-bearer: their eyes are large and elongated, noses stout and slightly hooked,

61 and chins punctuated by central dimples. This facilitates comparison between the figures and highlights the primacy of Martensen with the young Javanese man as his shadowed duplicate.

This example of hegemonic masculinity likely communicated to audiences in the Dutch Republic the perceived incapability of the Javanese to rule themselves and justified colonial rule as a fatherly source of masculine leadership.

In contrast with the diminished size of the young male pajong-bearer, Cuyp emphasizes the physical size and solid stance of Mevrouw Martensen in order to enhance the superiority of the couple and underscore the indispensability of wives in the governance of the household staff.

Although she, like the pajong-bearer, is widely excluded from discussions of this painting, the wife is crucial for emphasizing the inferiority of the manservant’s transgressive gender and race through juxtaposition. The wife is portrayed as strong and unmovable with feet shoulder width apart and broad shoulders facing the city in the background. Although certainly enhanced by her layered skirts, Mevrouw Martensen’s body is substantially wider than that of her husband.

Jacob’s body dwarfs that of the pajong-bearer, yet the wife’s body causes both men to appear physically diminished. This potential transgression of the social order is mitigated through the position of the wife behind her husband, the order of which is emphasized through his foot, which steps in front of her, and his pointed cane, which confines her body and restricts potential movement. Her eyes are glassy and convicting, her nose hooked, and her heavy chin draws her thin mouth into a slight frown. It is clear through these specified physical attributes that the figure of Mevrouw Martensen was modeled from an actual sitter. Like her husband, her pearly white skin gleams against the rich blackness of their fashionable Dutch attire, although the husband’s cheeks display a slight rosiness that is perhaps intended to reflect the idea of sun

62 exposure on the decks of his ships. The command of Mevrouw Martensen’s solid stance matches her spouse and renders the two an incontestably powerful pair.

In contrast with Cuyp’s other depictions of upper-class women, Mevrouw Martensen embodies qualities of aged maturity and authority of physical size. His depictions of female figures are few but are generally small in size with rosy cheeks and rounded, youthful faces.

Lady and Gentleman on Horseback (c. 1655, reworked 1660-65) (Figure 24) depicts two sitters of high socioeconomic status, tentatively identified as Adriaen Stevensz Snouck with Erkenraad

Matthisdr Berk, in a double equestrian portrait.107 Snouck wears a military-style tunic with riding boots and gloves. Berk’s blue velvet gown, slit sleeves and feathered hat reflect the French style that became popular in the 1660s. Evidence from x-rays of the underdrawing indicate that Cuyp significantly altered Berk’s posture in the final version. Originally, Berk was depicted with her right arm extended in order to hold the reins tightly, a substantially more active and empowered position.108 Although elevated on horseback and dressed in fine clothing, Berk’s agency is undermined through her withdrawn body position and meek stature.109 Mevrouw Martensen, on the other hand, is physically imposing and unapologetically rendered as an aged matriarch.

Although cached behind her husband’s cane, she represents an authoritative presence.

Mevrouw Martensen’s compelling, albeit restrained, authority reflects the social conditions of Batavia that empowered Dutch women to take on active leadership roles over the

107 Erkenraad Matthisdr Berk is the daughter of Matthijs Berk, Cuyp’s patron and Dordrecht’s chief representative in the States General. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., “Aelbert Cuyp, Lady and Gentleman on Horseback, c. 1655, reworked 1660/1665,” Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century, NGA Online Editions, accessed September 10, 2019, https://purl.org/nga/collection/artobject/1152.

108 Wheelock, “Aelbert Cuyp.”

109 Andrea Pearson has authored a compelling case study on Mary of Burgundy’s seals, in which the duchess rides horseback in a similar position as Berk. Pearson discusses the agency that this pose endowed Mary as a female ruler, the implications of which Cuyp likely tried to avoid by altering his final version. See: Andrea Pearson, “Rulership, Ridership, and the Perils of Sealing” in Mary of Burgundy: The Reign, the Persona, and the Legacy of a European Princess, ed. Elizabeth L’Estrange, et. al., forthcoming (Turnhout: Brepols).

63 domestic microcosm, as well as the shifting expectations for women in the northern Europe. In

Batavia, women were tasked with the management of household slaves, who took on the domestic tasks that usually preoccupied women in the Republic. As a result of increased free time, Dutch VOC wives developed strong feminine social networks, especially in the wake of their husbands’ absences, and managed orphanages and religious institutions. Although Cuyp may have channeled these aspects of feminine authority to fit the setting of Batavia, it is also true that Mevrouw Martensen, who likely never traveled to Southeast Asia, embodies contemporary

Dutch conceptions of femininity. According to Simon Schama, women were considered wild, inconsistent and self-indulgent when left unconstrained by marriage and conjugal duties.110 The most appropriate and crucial role for a woman, therefore, was as a wife and mother.

Paradoxically, Dutch women enjoyed relatively liberal public freedoms, as recorded by foreign visitors, which included public kissing, unaccompanied movement, and candid speech.111 From these restrictions and freedoms of Protestant and humanist ethos developed the “companionate family,” the cooperative model of which allowed women to assert themselves, albeit with limitations, within the public and private spheres.112 Dutch wives were required to balance aspects of homeliness of worldliness, of mortality and materialism. The home functioned as a microcosm for society and required proper cleanliness, productivity, and leadership. If the virtuous wife were forced to leave home for trade or travel, she “should at least conduct herself as if it were always with her.”113 Through the perspective of a male artist, Mevrouw Martensen

110 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Random House, 1988), 400.

111 Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 402.

112 Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 404.

113 Schama, Embarrassment of Riches, 391.

64 represents both worldliness, in her participation in imperialist missions, and homeliness, in her subservience to Jacob and modest attire.

The unity of Dutch colonizers against the rest of Batavia’s population is emphasized through the depiction of abundance and mutual affection within the Martensens’ marriage. The orange tree that reaches above the figures, although certainly symbolic of trade with China, were used medicinally to relieve morning sickness and would have symbolized fertility and the assurance of the continuation of the family line.114 The couple’s gently-clasped hands testify to the aforementioned “companionate” marriage, or marriage based on mutual desire and cooperation rather than a family’s financial or social benefit.115 Companionate marriages became popular in the late sixteenth century, largely due to the advent of Shakespearean romance and the writings of other Renaissance humanists.116 This shift in marital priorities initially generated controversy, but it seems that the notion that spouses should love each other in order to strengthen the lifelong bond of marriage grew to be accepted within the Protestant community.117

The Martensens’ companionate marriage is unique for both Cuyp and for images of Dutch

114 Craig Harbison, “Sexuality and Social Standing in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Double Portrait,” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 263.

115 Cuyp portrays a couple through similar compositional conventions in Portrait of the Sam Family (c. 1653) (Figure 26). In this strange contemporary example, the largest dutch man at the left stands beside his presumed wife, whose angled chin and arresting expression are reminiscent of Mevrouw Martensen. Notably, this couple’s hands do not touch. The husband appears to play with his child’s hair and the wife pinches a pink flower. It is clear that Cuyp’s portrayal of the Martensens through the pictorial conventions of a companionate marriage is unique and deliberate.

116 Paintings of couples who demonstrate aspects of companionate marriages are rare in VOC portraits. According to Jean Gelman Taylor’s case study of VOC paintings of women, Cuyp’s is the only example in which the couple is not portrayed formally (Taylor, “Painted Ladies of the VOC,” 66).

117 Katherine Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 47. English Puritan cleric and author William Whately wrote specifically on marital sex in The Bride-Bush (1617): “First, it [marital sex] must be cheerful; they must lovingly, willingly, and familiarly communicate themselves unto themselves, which is the best means to continue and nourish their mutual love.” (William Whately, A Bride-Bush: or, a direction for married persons, plainly describing the duties common to both, and particular to each of them (Bristol: William Pine, 1617), 43).

Batavians. Cuyp employs other popular conventions for modern romance in his depictions of couples, namely within the pair of half-length oval portraits of a young man and woman dressed for the hunt (Figure 25). Seventeenth-century emblematic literature and pastoral poetry glorified the innocence of romance in country life and often associated the hunt with love.118 The youthful age of the subjects suggest that the images commemorate a marriage, and the similarities in their exotic costumes and hunting tools reflect equal participation in the sport of romance. Whether pastoral or “companionate,” it is clear that Cuyp was knowledgeable of and inspired by contemporary shifts in conceptions of equitable romantic relationships and emphasized these themes of romance and fertility within the portrait.

The pajong-bearer is positioned as a foil to the Martensens, who are situated as culturally

“correct” and socially superior. The stability of the Martensen’s marital bond is underscored by the similarity of their posture and clothing, the blackness of which appears to melt the two into one. Black wool clothing was common in the Republic as a means for respectable adherence to

Protestant values, yet the Dutch in Batavia would have worn fabrics better suited to the climate.

While departing from the sartorial practices and expectations of Batavia, the depiction of the

Martensens in traditional attire solidifies their embodiment of Dutch values. The Javanese manservant is confined behind the two-headed Dutch body, submissive to their unified authority.

Ideal aspects of Dutch identity—a stable marriage, modesty, maritime prowess, commercial success—are exemplified through the Martensens. The pajong-bearer is positioned in opposition to these characteristics in order to underscore their primacy and correctness.

Cuyp’s portrayal of the resilience and universality of Dutch culture, which engulfs the

Javanese pajong-bearer, mitigates the aforementioned anxieties surrounding the Chinese and other minorities in Dutch Batavia. Dressed in a costume that reflects both modest Dutch and

118 Wheelock, Aelbert Cuyp, 144.

66 flamboyant court attire, the pajong-bearer is a shadowed duplicate of Jacob Martensen. By depicting a figure that corresponds to pictorial conventions for Dutch peasant men, Cuyp further

Europeanizes the indigenous body and emphasizes skin color and social position over indigenous culture as the primary factors that distinguish the superior from the inferior. The alignment of the

Javanese man’s body and his pajong with the orange tree underscore his fundamental connection to the earth upon which he stands. The Martensens, by contrast, stand superimposed upon the

Javanese harbor, the rattan cane indicating imperialist responsibility of, rather than integration within, the landscape. The Europeanization of Cuyp’s pajong-bearer before the Dutch colonial harbor conveys the Martensens’ responsibility over the colonization of the area and of the civilization of the indigenous people. Although he remains situated within his indigenous space, the Europeanized pajong-bearer, who stares fixedly into the back of the officer’s head, exemplifies a shift in allegiance to the Dutch colonizers. The pajong-bearer thereby elevates the status of the Martensens through their apparent success in civilization of the indigenous people and ownership of the land, which ultimately reflects optimism in the VOC’s ability to do the same.

CONCLUSION

POST-COLONIAL IMPLICATIONS OF VOC PAINTINGS

The microcosm depicted in Aelbert Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife, and

Manservant informs the colonialist mechanisms of social hierarchization, settlement, and material capital that defined seventeenth-century Dutch globalization. Chapter 1 contextualizes the work within the early years of trade under the VOC in Southeast Asia that determined the significance and reception of Cuyp’s painting. Contemporary representations of Batavia in the

Dutch Republic, including Andres Beeckman’s Het Kasteel van Batavia and Aelbert Eckhout’s

East Indian Market Stall in Batavia, mediated the impression of everyday life in the heterogeneous colonial city. Further, the contemporary concern for the success of Chinese trade fueled underlying anxieties surrounding the ability of the Dutch to maintain control over their economically adept population in Batavia. Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant operated within these contemporary conceptions of Dutch colonial control and economic success through the situationality of the city skyline and inclusion of the oranges and silk pajong as references to

Chinese trade. In Chapter 2, the visually Europeanized pajong-bearer emerges as a crucial representative of the indigenous Javanese population that was exploited by Dutch imperialism in order to promote a favorable image of their missions abroad. The dynamics of the visual relationship between the Martensens and their pajong-bearer, as dictated primarily by race and gender, inform the intended perception of Dutch dominance over the collective Southeast Asian population. Contemporary paintings of people of color in Europe, including Cuyp’s representations of black servants and Peter Paul Rubens’s Man in Korean Costume, confirm both the Europeanization of the pajong-bearer’s costume and position as well as the deliberately humanizing techniques of portraiture employed by Cuyp. Through analysis of the significance of

68 the pajong-bearer, it becomes clear that Cuyp portrayed Dutch culture as superior and all- encompassing in order to reflect optimism in the success of VOC trade and settlements in Asia.

Although specifically resonant within the historical moment, Cuyp’s painting depicts a fictional moment of maritime command within the career of a substitute captain. The aspect of atemporality ultimately lends Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant a quality of adaptable legibility. The conflation of several moments along the Martensen’s return voyage emphasizes the timelessness and universality of global trade and colonial settlement under the VOC. The point of

Martensen’s cane to the fleet of ships indicates his triumphant leadership and foreshadows the promise of future expeditions from Southeast Asia to the Dutch Republic. Although their clothing is historically inaccurate to the tropical setting, the triad of figures collectively testify to the supremacy of Dutch culture through their attire and relation to the imposing colonial city.

The pajong-bearer, who is visually similar to Cuyp’s images of black African enslaved manservants and Dutch peasants, stands apart from the others for his obedience and engagement with the officer. He and his Chinese silk pajong underscore the fact that control over indigenous minorities in Batavia and trade relations with China have already been, or inevitably will be, successful. Cuyp builds his composition from past representations of indigenous people, customs and landscapes, as well as travel accounts from early colonial missions of the previous century.

The Martensens thereby stand as felicitous apparitions on the harbor banks, rhetorically prophesying the past, present and future of Dutch globalization.

Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife and Manservant certainly resonated within the minds of the globally-conscious contemporary Dutch audience. In the modern moment, analysis of the motifs and social structures reflected within the image illuminate seventeenth-century concerns, both conscious and unrealized, that extended beyond any official views expressed by

69 the VOC into the everyday collective. The fact that this painting has never been investigated in a serious art historical capacity, let alone through the lens of post-colonialist criticism, is a striking indication of the scholarship that remains to be written on the paintings produced under the

VOC. These images provide salient insight into the Dutch perspective on the social dynamics between European and Asian communities during the early years of globalization. The conditions of early seventeenth-century Dutch colonial settlements were constantly evolving.

Although perceptions of difference were initially nascent and undefinable, images of the period reflect a gradual negotiation of “otherness” that can be interpreted by art historians. Careful consideration of the initial motivations behind and reception of these works will gradually nuance contemporary understanding of the European negotiation of difference and expanding worldview during the early years of global trade.

Investigations of race in early modern northern art undertaken to date have encouraged scholars to look for and interrogate representations of racial minorities in visual culture. Despite these advancements, considerable work remains to be done in order to reframe these figures not as victims of European fetishization and colonialism, but rather as individuals with agency and history. If not, scholars become complacent in the very system that initially suppressed these racial minorities. This project has interrogated the mechanisms of social hierarchy that functioned to repress indigenous people and capitalize upon their labor for colonialist means rather than focus on the positivist perspective of Dutch accomplishments. It considers a conceptualized indigenous body as a foil to conceptualized Dutch bodies, but also interrogate the nuances of this relationship that expose European anxieties surrounding power and gender.

Moving forward, it is important for historians to use the existing scholarship on globalization,

70 trade and colonialism as tools to further the collective understanding of the critical implications of European expansion on global minorities.

Over time, I imagine that racial and post-colonial studies in early modern northern art will take a similar course as feminist art history, moving beyond the mere identification and reinsertion of racial minorities into art historical conversation toward advocacy and critical interrogation of the larger social systems that created and enforced their inferior social positions.

Early modern representations of Europeans produced by non-European artists require further critical attention, the study of which will encourage further transition away from the Eurocentric view of history. Scholars must remember that social categories such as race, class and gender are not mutually exclusive and must be considered in tangence in order to gain a complete perspective of the mechanisms of early modern colonialism, as exemplified through the complex hierarchical dynamic between Jacob Martensen and the pajong-bearer. It is increasingly clear that art historians will continue to seek examples that represent different racial types apart from black Africans and indigenous Americans, groups upon which scholars have historically focused.

As exemplified through this project, the Chinese and Japanese were crucial to the success of

European globalization and are readily identifiable in contemporary visual culture. Stereotypes surrounding the cultural practices and appearances of these groups circulated in pervasive and damaging ways, as with African and indigenous American communities through the contemporaneous movements of the slave trade and New World exploration. Critical consideration of the contemporary reception of the generation of children with mixed racial backgrounds born in the wake of colonialism, such as those in Dutch Batavia, will lead to further fruitful discussions about the construction of identity and “otherness” in the early modern period.

The pajong-bearer ultimately represents far more than the immediate community of indigenous Javanese, but rather encourages identification and critical investigation of similarly marginalized minority figures. Regardless of period, the dissection of visual culture produced in the context of colonialism illuminates the ugly mechanisms employed to propel outwardly noble and justified global missions and encourages vast reconsideration of the inherited historical narrative. Aelbert Cuyp’s VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife and Manservant offers a window into seventeenth-century concerns surrounding Dutch globalization that extends beyond capital or territorial gain, but rather reflects the cultivation of superior shared identity and investment in the common objective. Through the Europeanization of the pajong-bearer, anxieties surrounding novel engagement with the culturally unfamiliar and the possible failure of globalization were, at least temporarily, quelled for Cuyp, the Martensens, and the audience in the Dutch Republic. The fictional scene thereby carries multivalent significance as a reflection of seventeenth-century

Dutch concern with non-European people and places, while providing an optimistic perspective on the future of Dutch globalization and the individual success that could be achieved through colonial missions.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1: Aelbert Cuyp, VOC Senior Merchant, his Wife, and Manservant, c. 1640-60. Oil on canvas.

Figure 2 : Andries Beeckman, Het Kasteel van Batavia, c. 1661. Oil on canvas.

Figure 3 : Albert Eckhout, East Indian Market Stall in Batavia, c. 1640-1666. Oil on canvas.

Figure 4 : Detail. Joan Blaeu, Imperii Sinarum, 1665. Hand-colored print.

Figure 5 : Unknown artist, Chinese Quilt for European Market, 17th century. Center panel and outer border: silk with gilt-paper-wrapped thread; pink borders: silk damask.

Figure 6 : Jacob Jansz. Coeman, Painting of Pieter Cnoll, Cornelia van Nieuwroode and their family, 1665. Oil on canvas.

Figure 7 : Anonymous artist, Bazar ofte groote merckt tot Bantam, from the travelogue of Cornelis de Houtman’s voyage to the East Indies (1595-97), 1597-98 or 1646. Etched engraving on paper.

Figure 8 : Julius Milheuser, Gezicht oft Batavia, published by Johannes de Ram, c. 1619-80. Etched engraving on paper.

Figure 10 : Titian, Portrait of Laura Dianti (Eustochia), c. 1520-25. Oil on canvas.

Figure 11 : Peter Paul Rubens, Man in Korean Costume, c. 1617. Black chalk with touches of red chalk in the face.

Figure 12 : Anonymous artist, Javanese Dance, from the travelogue of Cornelis de Houtman’s voyage to the East Indies (1595-97), 1597-98 or 1646. Etched engraving on paper.

Figure 13 : Wouter Schouten, Ambonese en Javaanse parades en een Maleier bruiloft, c. 1664. Pen, brush and pencil on paper.

Figure 14 : Wouter Schouten, Studieblad met Chinese en Javaanse mannen en vrouwen, c. 1664. Pen, brush and pencil on paper.

Figure 15 : Wouter Schouten, Studieblad, onder andere met een kok, etende mannen, een Javaanse Chinees en waterdragers, c. 1664. Pen, brush and pencil on paper.

Figure 16 : Aelbert Cuyp, Groom with Half-Hidden Horseman, c. 1650. Oil on canvas.

Figure 17 : Aelbert Cuyp, River Landscape with Riders, c. 1653-57. Oil on canvas.

Figure 18 : Frans Hals, Family Group in a Landscape, c. 1645-1648. Oil on canvas.

Figure 19 : Aelbert Cuyp, The Negro Page, c. 1652. Oil on canvas.

Figure 20 : Aelbert Cuyp, Huntsmen Halted, c. 1650-55. Oil on canvas.

Figure 21 : Aelbert Cuyp, Avenue at Meerdevort, c. 1650-52. Oil on panel.

Figure 22 : Aelbert Cuyp, Equestrian portrait of Pieter de Roovere, c. 1650. Oil on canvas.

Figure 23 : Aelbert Cuyp, Equestrian portrait of Cornelis and Michiel Pompe van Meerdervoort with their Tutor and Coachman, c. 1652-3. Oil on canvas.

Figure 24 : Aelbert Cuyp, Lady and Gentleman on Horseback, c. 1655, reworked 1660-65. Oil on canvas.

Figure 25 : Aelbert Cuyp, Portrait of a Man with a Rifle and Portrait of a Woman aged Twenty- One, as a Hunter, c. 1651. Oil on panel.

Figure 26 : Aelbert Cuyp, Portrait of the Sam Family, c. 1653. Oil on canvas.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abeyasekere, Susan. “Slaves in Batavia: Insights from a Slave Register.” In Slavery, Bondage, and Dependency in Southeast Asia. Edited by Anthony Reid. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983.

Aelbert Cuyp. Edited by Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. Exhibition catalogue. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2001.

Aldrich, Robert. Colonialism and Homosexuality. London: Routledge, 2003.

Bindman, David, Dalton, Karen C. C., and Gates, Henry Louis. The Image of the Black in Western Art. Vol. 3 pt. 1. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.

Blussé, Leonard. “An Insane Administration and an Unsanitary Town: The Dutch East India Company and Batavia (1619–1799).” In Colonial Cities, edited by Robert J. Ross and Gerard J. Telkamp, 65–86. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985.

— — —. Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in Voc Batavia. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1986.

Chijs, Jacobus Anne van der. Nederlandsch-Indisch Plakaatboek. 17 vols. Batavia: Landsdrukkerij, 1885–1900.

Chong, Alan, and Begemann, Egbert Haverkamp. “Aelbert Cuyp and the Meanings of Landscape.” PhD diss. New York University, 1992.

Chopra, Radhika. “Invisible Men: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Male Domestic Labor.” Men and Masculinities 9, no. 2 (October 2006): 152–167.

Crawford, Katherine. European Sexualities, 1400-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Crenshaw, Paul, Rebecca Tucker, and Alexandra Bonfante-Warren. Discovering the Great Masters: The Art Lover’s Guide to Understanding Symbols in Paintings. New York: Universe Publishing, 2009.

Deursen, A. T. Van. Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion, and Society in Seventeenth-Century Holland. Translated by Maarten Ultee. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Drakenstein, Hendrik van Reede tot. Horticus indicus malabaricus, continens regioni malabarici apud Indos celeberrini onmis generis plantas rariores, 12 vols. Amsterdam: 1678-93.

Erikson, Peter. “Invisibility Speaks: Servants and Portraits in Early Modern Visual Culture.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (2009).

— — —. “Representations of Blacks and Blackness in the Renaissance,” Criticism: a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 35, no. 4 (Fall 1993).

Fayle, Ernst C., ed. Voyages to the East Indies: Christopher Fryke and Christopher Schweitzer. Cassell: London, 1929.

Haan, F de. Oud Batavia: Platenalbum. Batavia: 1929.

Harbison, Craig. “Sexuality and Social Standing in Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Double Portrait.” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 249-291.

Haskins, Victoria, Claire Lowrie, Julia Martinez and Frances Steel. Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Henley, David and Henk Schulte Nordhodt. Environment, Trade and Society in Southeast Asia. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Hochstrasser, Julie Berger. Still Life and Trade in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

Israel, Jonathan. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Kehoe, Marsely L. "Dutch Batavia: Exposing the Hierarchy of the Dutch Colonial City." Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 7, no. 1 (Winter 2015).

Kettering, Alison. “The Batavian Arcadia: Pastoral Themes In Seventeenth-century Dutch Art.” PhD Diss. Berkeley: University of California Berkeley, 1974.

Kloek, Wouter Th. Aelbert Cuyp: Land, Water, Light. Translated by Lynne Richards. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2002.

Kop, G. G. van der. Batavia, Queen City of the East. London: G. Kolff & Co., 1926.

Linschoten, Jan Huygen van. Interario, voyage ofte schipvaert, van Ian Huygen van Linschoten, naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien. Amsterdam: Cornelis Claesz, 1596.

— — —. Interario: Voyage ofte Schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten naer oost ofte Portugaels Indien, 1579-1592. Ed. Hendrik Kern and Heert Terpestra. Werken vitgegeven door de Linschoten-Vereniging, II. The Hauge, Martinus Nijhoff, 1910 [1596].

— — —. Interario: Voyage ofte Schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten naer oost ofte Portugaels Indien, 1579-1592. Ed. Hendrik Kern and Heert Terpestra. 3 vols. Vol. I: 1955, vol. 2: 1956, vol. 3: 1957. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955-57 [1596].

Loughman, John. "New Light on Some Portraits by Aelbert Cuyp." The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1266 (2008): 584-91.

Lowe, Kate. “Visible Lives: Black Gondoliers and Other Black Africans in Renaissance Venice.” Renaissance Quarterly 66, no. 2 (June 1, 2013): 412–452.

Martínez, Julia, Claire Lowrie, Frances Steel, and Victoria K. Haskins. Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Meilink-Roelofsz, M. A. P. Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962.

Mrinalini, Sinha. Colonial Masculinity: The “Manly Englishman” and the “Effeminate Bengali” in the Late Nineteenth Century. Manchester: United Press, 1995.

Odell, Dawn. “Clothing, Customs and Mercantilism: Dutch and Chinese Ethnographies in the Seventeenth Century.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 53 no. 1 (2002): 139-160.

— — —. “Public Identity and Material Culture in Dutch Batavia.” In Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration, and Convergence; The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress on the History of Art, The University of Melbourne, 13-18 January 2008, edited by Jaynie Anderson, 253-57. Carlton, Australia: Miegunyah Press, 2009.

Oostindie, G.J., Paasman, B., and Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. “Dutch Attitudes Towards Colonial Empires, Indigenous Cultures, and Slaves.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 31 (1998): 349–355.

Parthesius, Robert. Dutch Ships in Tropical Waters: the Development of the Dutch East India (VOC) Shipping Network in Asia 1595-1660. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010.

Pearson, Andrea. “Rulership, Ridership, and the Perils of Sealing.” In Mary of Burgundy: The Reign, the Persona, and the Legacy of a European Princess, ed. Elizabeth L’Estrange, et. al., forthcoming. Turnhout: Brepols.

Protschky, Susie. “The Colonial Table: Food, Culture and Dutch Identity in Colonial Indonesia.” Australian Journal of Politics & History 54, no. 3 (September 2008): 346–357.

Reid, Anthony, ed. Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1983.

Reiss, Stephen. Aelbert Cuyp. 1st ed. London: Zwemmer, 1975.

Romney, Susanah Shaw. New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America / Susanah Shaw Romney. Chapel Hill, North Carolina:

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2014.

Sander, Jochen, ed. The Magic of Things: Still-Life Painting 1500-1800. Frankfurt: Städel Museum, 2008. Published following the exhibition The Magic of Things: Still-Life Painting 1500-1800 at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.

Sapra, Rahul. The Limits of Orientalism: Seventeenth-Century Representations of India. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011.

Schama, Simon. The Embarrassment of Riches: an Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.

Schrader, Stephanie. “Implicit Understanding: Rubens and the Representation of the Jesuit Missions in Asia.” In Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia, ed. Stephanie Schrader, 39-67. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013.

Schmidt, Benjamin. Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570-1670. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Sluiter, Engel. “Dutch Maritime Power and the Colonial Status Quo, 1585-1641.” Pacific Historical Review 11 (January 1942): 29-41.

Stechow, Wolfgang. “Significant Dates on Some Seventeenth Century Dutch Landscape Paintings.” Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 75, no. 1 (1960): 79–92.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

— — —. “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia.” In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, 198-237. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Taylor, Jean Gelman. “Meditations on a Portrait from Seventeenth-Century Batavia.” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 37, no. 1 (February 2006): 23–41.

— — —. “Painted Ladies of the VOC.” South African Historical Journal 59 (2007): 47-78.

— — —. The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Dutch Asiac. 2nd edition. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

Van Duivenvoorde, Wendy. Dutch East India Company Shipbuilding: The Archeological Study of Batavia and other Seventeenth-Century VOC Ships. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015.

Van Reede tot Drakenstein, Hendrik. Horticus indicus malabaricus, continens regioni malabarici apud Indos celeberrini onmis generis plantas rariores. 12 vols. Amsterdam: 1678-93.

Warnsinck, J. C. M., ed. Reisen van Nicolaus de Graaff gedaan naar aile gewesten des werelds, beginnende 1639 tot 1687 incluis (Journeys of Nicolaus de Graaff to all quarters of the world, beginning in 1639 up until 1687 inclusive). 's-Gravenhage: M. Nijhoff, 1930.

Whately, William. A Bride-Bush: or, a direction for married persons, plainly describing the duties common to both, and particular to each of them. Bristol: William Pine, 1617.

Wheelock, Arthur K. Aelbert Cuyp. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001.

— — —. “Aelbert Cuyp, Lady and Gentleman on Horseback, c. 1655, reworked 1660/1665,” Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century, NGA Online Editions, https://purl.org/nga/collection/artobject/1152 (accessed September 10, 2019).

Zandvliet, Kees. The Dutch Encounter with Asia, 1600-1950. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

— — —. Mapping for money: Maps, plans, and topographic paintings and their role in Dutch overseas expansion during the 16th and 17th centuries. Batavian Lion International: Amsterdam, 1998.