Cornelis de Bruyn

Cornelis de Bruyn, born at The Hague in 1652 and schooled as a painter, joined the Dutch artists’ colony in Rome from 1676 and drew across the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor, gathering the material of his first illustrated book, which appeared in 1698. A second journey, financed by the Amsterdam burgomaster Nicolaas Witsen, took him further still: he painted Peter the Great at Moscow, drew the ruins of Persepolis, and travelled on through India, visiting Ceylon briefly in 1705 before reaching Batavia.

His account of that second journey, published at Amsterdam in 1711 with some three hundred pictures, states plainly that its drawings show what he actually saw; he worked mainly in watercolour, and died at Utrecht about 1727. A professional painter among the soldiers and surgeons who otherwise filled the Dutch record of the island, de Bruyn was the trained exception. His Ceylon was glimpsed in passing rather than settled in, yet his hand carried the discipline of a career spent drawing the East.

What de Bruyn brought that the others could not was a professional’s standard of accuracy. He had made his name on the ruins of Persepolis, drawing them with a care that later scholars still valued, and he carried the same method east, working in watercolour from the thing itself and pressing in his prefaces the claim that his plates showed only what his own eye had seen. That insistence on fidelity, rare in an age when the engraver improved freely on the draughtsman, is his real place in the island’s record. His Ceylon amounts to little, a few days’ sight on the way to Batavia, yet it was seen by a hand that had spent a lifetime learning to look, and it stands apart from the soldier’s rough sketch and the compiler’s borrowed plate alike.

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. de Bruyn, Cornelis. Reizen over Moskovie, door Persie en Indie. Amsterdam, 1711.