View of Batavia

Entry

Four rows of towering coconut palms dominate this unique view of Batavia. In the foreground is the busy marketplace bordered by the Kali Besar river on the right. In the background on the other side is the castle erected by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). A group of officials on horseback has just left and crossed the drawbridge. The white building on the far right is the company’s main storehouse, and in front of it is the headquarters of the Council of Justice. Next to the river is a small shipyard. Andries Beeckman omitted some of the architecture and depicted the Kali Besar considerably smaller than it was in reality in order to provide a better sight of the castle.

The painting’s main point of interest is the portrayal of foreign people and costumes, the models for which can be found in Beeckman’s albums of watercolours (fig. a, fig. b). They give an excellent impression of the various inhabitants of Batavia at the time. Two Chinese merchants are arguing in the left foreground. Behind them, under the overhanging roof, two Javanese farmers are threshing rice as a Chinese artisan approaches. On the corner of the main building the artist drew the sketchy outlines of a tame cockatoo sitting on a perch. Between the first and second row of trees a group of Javanese are playing sepak raga, a form of soccer, watched by a crowd of Dutchmen and natives.¹¹ One of the bare-chested men in the centre has just kicked the ball, which is hovering high above in the air. A well-dressed Dutch official and his Indonesian wife are strolling in the centre foreground, escorted by a boy holding a pajong over their heads. Figures from various nations can be distinguished between the palms behind them, such as a Bengali dressed in white and a Sulawesian warrior.

Further to the right in the foreground, identified by his striped clothes, is a Mardijker, a formerly enslaved Asian man who had converted to Christianity after his liberation (from the Malaysian merdeka, meaning ‘free’). Behind him two female fruit sellers have their goods spread out on the ground. In the distance, near a little hut, a Dutchman has joined some Chinese, possibly for a game of dice. The actual marketplace is between the last row of trees and the river. In the foreground a Chinese with a knife in his mouth is showing a chunk of fish to a Mardijker. To his left is a Japanese man in a blue kimono who is wearing a hat to signify his conversion to Christianity. Behind them other figures are bringing baskets with merchandise to the market. Two boats are transporting people and goods to and from the other areas of town.

Apart from these easily recognizable elements, there are many less conspicuous exotic details. The most remarkable are the camel on the far side of the river, the brush-tailed animal and the Javanese man climbing the coconut palms, and another one precariously balancing on the planks which connect the treetops. Despite the sometimes sketchy and rather clumsy execution, the artist does provide the viewer with a comprehensive impression of seventeenth-century Batavia.

In 1662 the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC paid Beeckman 120 guilders for two pictures, one of which must have been this View of Batavia.¹² In 1663 it hung in East India House in Amsterdam’s Hoogstraat, and is mentioned in Olfert Dapper’s description of the city of that year: ‘Chinese and Japanese paintings hang on display in the hall where the governors meet and discuss their trade. Hanging there too is the large city of Batavia with its terrifying and invincible castle’.¹³ More than a century later Beeckman’s View of Batavia was still the showpiece of the building, as can be gauged from a 1771 drawing by Simon Fokke,¹⁴ which shows it mounted above the fireplace in the conference room of the Lords XVII, surrounded by lesser scenes of other Asian towns.

Beeckman’s material was eagerly copied. His figures, including those in the Rijksmuseum picture, recur in several seventeenth-century travelogues and books on Asia.¹⁵ As early as 1688 the Saxon Elector Johan George III asked the Amsterdam chamber of the VOC for permission to have the present work replicated.¹⁶ That very probably resulted in the View of Batavia signed ‘J.F.F.’ now in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.¹⁷ According to De Haan that second version was by Beeckman as well and represented the return of the Dutch captain Arnoud de Vlamingh to Batavia on 14 August 1656 after his victory in the Ambonese war.¹⁸ In his opinion De Vlamingh probably commissioned it and had himself depicted in the foreground, as the Dutchman with his Indonesian wife. The Rijksmuseum canvas, De Haan believed, was also ordered by De Vlamingh and was thus incorrectly dated around 1662. Although Beeckman must have made his preparatory drawings some time between early 1653 and early 1657, the period he presumably spent in the Indies, neither painting predates December 1658, when he was back in Amsterdam. While the Rijksmuseum picture was paid for in April 1662, and was thus most likely executed around then, the one in the Tropenmuseum has to be dated much later, presumably in or around 1688. It cannot be attributed to Beeckman on stylistic grounds, and there is no reason to doubt the signature ‘J.F.F.’. As some of the figures do correspond with those in the present canvas, the copyist either used another View of Batavia by Beeckman as his model or had original drawings by the artist at his disposal. Much later works that were clearly inspired by Beeckman’s painting are the 1864 View of Batavia by Contadyn Cunaeus, which was in the former Museum Nusantara in Delft,¹⁹ and a copy in the Nasional Museum in Jakarta.²⁰

Erlend de Groot, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements