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.