Albrecht Herport

Albrecht Herport, a landscape painter of Berne, born in 1641 and dead by 1680, 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.