Jacob Haafner

Jacob Haafner, born at Halle in 1754, was the son of a ship’s doctor and taken to the East as a boy. Years in India followed, in Company and private service alike, until the English captured him at Madras; he escaped, crossed Ceylon on foot, and returned to Europe in 1787. Out of that long passage through the East came the material of his later life, for it was only in his final years that he set down a series of travel books, illustrated with engravings cut mostly from his own designs by Reinier Vinkeles.

His Ceylon book, ‘Reize te voet door het eiland Ceilon’, a journey on foot through the island of Ceylon, was finished by his son and published at Amsterdam in 1810, with more than a hundred pages given to the island’s people and nature; an English translation followed in 1821. He wrote as an anti-colonialist ahead of his time, and died at Amsterdam in 1809, the book he had begun completed by another hand.

The pictures in his books are of a piece with the prose. Reinier Vinkeles, among the leading Amsterdam engravers of the day, cut them from Haafner’s own designs, and they carry the softened, feeling light of the late eighteenth century, figures set in landscape with a sympathy the earlier fort-views never sought. Haafner drew the island at eye level, on foot and among its people, and the plates take the part of those people much as his writing does. His place in the record is small in quantity and distinct in spirit, the one maker of the Dutch century who looked at Ceylon with something like tenderness.

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. Haafner, Jacob. Reize te voet door het eiland Ceilon. Amsterdam, 1810.