Raden Saleh (1811-1880), Dutch Indies Now Indonesia
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
1 The Asian Modern © John Clark, 2013 Raden Saleh (1811-1880), Dutch Indies now Indonesia Apart from other writings, the principal understanding of Raden Saleh has been accomplished by Werner Kraus working chiefly on Indonesian and German sources, and Marie-Odette Scalliet, working on Indonesia and French sources as well as archival documents in Dutch from the court and other government archives in Den Haag. These include the secret briefing reports to the King. Modern knowledge about Raden Saleh, rather than hearsay commentary on handed down rumours, is almost entirely due to their efforts, and much of what follows would have been impossible without their work and the directions for inquiry indicated by it. Precursor discourses domestic 1778 VOC founds the Bataviaasch Genootshcap voor Kunsten en Wettens Chappen Terms related to painting in classical Javanese: Ranggâjiwa painter or decorator Citrakara maker of citra, image that is a painter Citraleka image or painting Prabangkara painter Contemporary Javanese works for painter Penyungging, juru sungging, juru gambar (SY (Sanento Yuliman Hardiwardoyo), 1981, 13-14) Citation from Ma Huan in Yingyai Shenglan, 1416 apparently a description of a wayang-bèbèr or wayang-karèbèt There is a sort of men who paint on paper men, birds, animals. Insects and so on: the paper is like a scroll and is fixed between two wooden rollers three feet high; at one side these rollers are level with the edge of the paper whilst they protrude on the other side. The man squats down on the ground and places the picture before him, unrolling one part after the other and turning it towards the spectators, whilst in the native language and in a very loud voice he gives an explanation of every part; the spectators sit around him and listen, laughing and crying according to what he tells them (Grooneveldt, 1960, 53 in SY, 1981, 14)’ Envoy from the Great King of Java (Majapahit) brought to Albuquerque on capture of Malaka in 1511, a long cloth on which were painted all his wars with horse and elephant borne palanquins with the king surrounded by four flags and his courtège. (SY, 1981, 17, citation via Dutch translation of text of Fernão Lopes de Castanheda, 1552, English translation by Thomas East, 1580.) European painting commenced interest among high status persons in the archipelago in first decades of 17th century. (SY, 1981, 31) VOC took Malaka in 1641. Topographical depiction began with architects and draughtsmen such as Johann Wolfgang Heydt, Johannes Rach chief of artillery and painter Carl Friedrich Reimer director of fortifications and hydraulic construction but also a draughtsman during 18th century. (SY, 1981, 32) Art worlds: Javanese court patronage 2 The Asian Modern © John Clark, 2013 The Javans have made no progress in drawing or painting; nor are there any traces to be found of their having, at any former period of their history , attained any proficiency in this art’. (Raffles 1817/1978, p.472, in Kraus 1996, p.29) They are not, however, ignorant of proportions or perspective, nor are they insensible to the beauty and effect of the productions. Their eye is correct and their hand steady, and if required to sketch any particular object, they produce a very fair resemblance to the original. They are imitative, and though genius in this art may not have appeared among them, there is no reason to believe that, with due encouragement, they would not be found less ingenious than other nations in a similar stage of civilization. (Raffles in Kraus, 1996). They (the Javanese) have a tradition, that the art of painting was once successfully cultivated among them, and a period is even assigned to the loss of it. (Raffles 1817/1978, p.473 in Kraus-1996, 30). Losses of Raffles: his second and larger collection was burnt in the vessel Fame in 1824. It included: ..a superb collection of drawings in natural history, executed under my immediate eye, and intended, with the other interesting objects of natural history, for the museum of the Honourable Court. They exceeded in number two thousand; and having been taken from life, and with scientific accuracy, were executed in a style far superior to anything I had seen or heard of in Europe. (Forge, 1994, 112, citation from Memoir of the life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, by his Widow, London 1830, II, pp.329, 330). 1 Literary references indicate presence of paintings in Java from at least the 1400s. 2 Paintings or tapestries with figuration brought to Indonesian archipelago by Portuguese in 16th century, Dutch brought paintings and many prints, several painters active in Batavia. 3. Surviving forms of Javanese illustration and manuscript decoration in the 18th century 4. Illustrations done for Marsden’s History of Sumatra, 1811 5. The illustrations done for Raffles in 1811-1816 for his History of Java and subsequent variations 6. Work by Adi Warna who illustrated 11 of 34 plates in Crawfurd, History of Indian Archipelago, 1820 Pre-European views of landscape in Java: One should imagine, therefore, not simply a process by which Indic mythological heroes were “localized” by means of Javanizing settings represented on temple reliefs and in narrative poems, but a two-way act of cultural and political appropriation. Indic myths and heroes were appropriated by Javanese kings by being placed in localized, Javanese natural settings and thus transformed into efficacious ancestors. At the same time, Indic epics and heroes themselves helped kings to appropriate the setting for the epical deeds of royal ancestors implied how living kings could view and act within the real countryside of Java. It is in a kingly, Indic, ancestralized as well as Javanized “landscape” that the court poets represented their own religious quest as having taken placed in kakawin. The ordering of the real Javanese “landscape” was itself a central aim of writing and religious questing. (Day 1994, 195) I do not think that the visualization of the natural world in early Java involved an investigation of natural forces. Certain natural processes were probably of great interest in 3 The Asian Modern © John Clark, 2013 early Java: the forging of weapons and the dyeing of natural cloth may well have stimulated close observation of the nature of decay and death as well as speculation about immortality. …Although strong arguments can be made for thinking that “nature” versus “culture” is an essential opposition in early Javanese political thought and temple art, I myself think that every representation of “nature” in early Javanese art is already a “landscape” implying the king’s implicit, ordering presence within the natural world. (Day 1994, 198) Training for artists in 1830s RS did not go to the Haagse Academie van Beeldende Kunsten for which he was not considered by his patrons but studied with Cornelis Kruseman then Schelfhout. In any case, RS arrived too late in 1829 to enter the Winter term from October to the following April, and without having done preparatory course would not have been able to enter until the summer season which began in May. Thus RS did not study the nude until at Dresden and Paris, and then lacked the figure painting formation essential for an academy painter. But his patron Baud knew Kruseman by whom his portrait was painted in 1826, that is two years after Kruseman’s return from Rome. Cornelis Kruseman (1797-1857) was a pupil of the English portraitist Charles Hodges (1764- 1837) who lived in Amsterdam, and at the age of fourteen in 1811 entered the Amsterdam drawing academy. He was endowed with less talent than Jan Willem Pieneman, but he had: a greater desire for refinement and less vigour, displayed a hankering after more pronounced forms and, in the absence of a natural gift for colour, employed hard tones for his biblical and Italian subjects and, in general turned the art of painting into an uncouth classicism. (Marius,18). Kruseman had been in Italy from 1821-1824 and his works showed ‘the influence of Raphael filtered through that of Overbeck and Nazarene painting’ (Marius 17), which had been in high fashion in Rome when he was there. though his ideas were formed upon the Italian masters of the Renaissance and upon Raphael in particular, he lacked the feeling and the technical knowledge necessary to emulate the peculiar qualities of those masters’. (Marius 18) Cornelis Kruseman’s phlegmatic ideas were in the taste of the day: any passion would have disturbed the tranquility of a view of life which demanded that everything should be gentle, pious and noble. Marius, p.20) Kruseman was not as talented as a portraitist as his cousin Jan Adam Kruseman (1804-1862) and Jan Willem Pieneman (1779-1853). From 1816, Pieneman was director of the Royal Collection and from 1820, first President of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts as an official painter of grand battle scenes. His student Josef Israëls said that he was a genius who grew up in an inartistic age, and it was not his fault if the times in which he lived prevented him from developing himself. In a society in a state of transformation, where, on the one hand, men, proud of their recovered nationality, asked for topical pictures representing the heroic deeds of the day, while on the other hand, a pious tendency held sway and called for religious or kindred subjects strictly confined to the limits of the middle class virtues, there was no opportunity for the exaltation of painting pure and simple and l’Art pour l’art for once became a misplaced maxim. Marius, p.14-15. His son Nicolaas Pieneman (1809-1860) enjoyed even greater favour but, …with neither his father’s temperament nor vigour, and , possibly by way of a reaction against the latter’s frequent want of polish, he painted in a soapy and feeble style, especially his royal portraits which are smooth and insipid and devoid of all life.