Albrecht Herport

Albrecht Herport, a landscape painter of Berne, born in 1641 and dead in 1730, trained as an artist before enlisting in the Company’s service in 1659. His soldiering carried him across the eastern trade, first to Formosa and Macao, then under Rijckloff van Goens to the Malabar coast, and at the very end of 1662 to Ceylon, where he remained about four years before leaving in 1666. Few trained painters saw the island from the deck of a soldier’s career, and fewer still set down what they saw.

His travel account, printed at Berne in 1669 and translated into Dutch the following year, carries nine illustrations worked up from his own sketches, three of them of Sri Lanka. Styling himself an amateur of the painters’ art, he noted that his skill let him draw from life the peoples, fruits, animals, fortifications and ships he encountered. He stands among the very few schooled painters to have recorded seventeenth-century Ceylon at first hand.

His eye was formed before his soldiering. He had trained at Berne under Albrecht Kauw, a painter of landscape and still life in the Swiss ‘Kleinmeister’ manner, and that schooling sets him apart in the Company’s ranks, where the men who could draw were mostly surveyors and clerks working to a rule. Herport drew as a landscape painter draws, and turned the habit on whatever the campaign put before him, the peoples and dress of the coast, the fruits and animals, the forts and the ships in the roads. The nine plates of the Berne book were cut on copper by another hand after his sketches, so the finished sheet is his drawing at a remove, yet the seeing in them is his, and first-hand seeing by a trained painter is the rarest thing in the whole seventeenth-century record of the island. Where Vingboons built a true likeness from other men’s reports, Herport carried the opposite gift, the trained hand that had actually stood on the ground.

Sources

1. de Silva, R.K., and W.G.M. Beumer. Illustrations and Views of Dutch Ceylon 1602–1796. E.J. Brill / Serendib Publications. 1988.
2. Herport, Albrecht. Eine kurtze Ost-Indianische Reiß-Beschreibung. Berne: Georg Sonnleitner. 1669.