Cornelis Steiger

Cornelis Steiger set down the Dutch strongholds of Ceylon as they stood about 1710. Little is recorded of the man beyond the drawings themselves, a suite of coloured views held now in the Rijksmuseum: Colombo seen from the roadstead, with the fort, the Company’s warehouses, the governor’s residence, the church and the wharf ranged along the shore; the fort at Galle; and the courtyard and church of the fort at Jaffna.

They are working topographies, laid in brush and bodycolour with a surveyor’s care for what stood where, and together they form one of the fullest visual accounts of the maritime provinces under the Company. Where a later British view sought the picturesque, Steiger’s purpose was record, and the value of the sheets is exactly that plainness.