Carl Frederick Reimer

Carl Frederick Reimer, born at Königsberg in East Prussia, entered the Company as a private soldier in 1767, and his medical skill carried him to Ceylon as an under-surgeon; from 1777 he served as a land-surveyor with the rank of ensign-engineer, in Colombo until 1781, and rose to Director of Fortifications and Inspector of Waterworks. He returned to Ceylon in 1789 with a deputation to inspect its defensive works, and his fortification reports and drawings survive in the Dutch archives, a record of the island’s defences at the close of Company rule.

A skilful technical draughtsman and a talented artist, he is thought the likely hand behind two anonymous watercolours of the Company’s hospital at Colombo of 1772, careful studies whose author was never named. A view of Colombo of 1785 stands behind one of Jan Brandes’s own, his work thus feeding into a better-known artist’s record. He died at Batavia in 1796, far from the Prussian city of his birth.

The engineer’s training shows in the art. Reimer’s surviving Ceylon work is chiefly the fortification drawing, the measured plan and section of the island’s defences, and the same exact hand is felt in the ceremonial watercolour of the Kandyan audience, where the ranks of figures and the mirrored hall are set down with a draughtsman’s control rather than a painter’s flourish. He worked, as the surveyors did, for record and not for effect, and that precise manner is why later scholars have been ready to give him the anonymous Colombo studies of 1772 and the view that lies behind Brandes. His is the art of the technician who could also see.

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. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Reception of the King of Kandy’s Envoys by Governor Iman Falck (watercolour, 1772). https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/object/Reception-of-the-King-of-Kandys-Envoys-by-Governor-Imam-Falck--0af8f0a318499763d2314c6505c6ef4d