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.

The technique is the surveyor’s colour view, brush and opaque bodycolour laid over a measured drawing, each stronghold given from the water so that its seaward face and the vessels that served it could be read at a glance. The man himself is almost unrecorded, so the work must stand for him, and it stands well: a clear, unhurried account of the Dutch forts at the height of the Company’s hold, made when the island’s whole purpose, in Amsterdam’s eyes, was the line of strongholds along its shore.

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. Steiger, Cornelis. View of Colombo from the roadstead (brush and bodycolour, c. 1710). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colombo_gezien_vanaf_de_rede_.el_Colombo_van_%27S_Compagnies_Rheede_(titel_op_object),_RP-T-1902-A-4663.jpg