Jan Brandes

Jan Brandes came to Ceylon as a churchman and left one of the warmest records of it. A Lutheran minister in the service of the Dutch, pastor at Batavia from 1779, he broke his homeward voyage in the island and was at Colombo and Galle in 1785 and 1786, and he filled his album with what caught his eye: the view of Colombo from Slave Island, the town’s tower and streets, and above all the ordinary domestic life around him, the people, dress, plants and interiors that the official record passed over. Slave Island, the lake quarter he drew, took its name from the enslaved people, most of them African, whom the Dutch held there.

In Colombo he was the guest of the merchant van Randzouw and took drawing lessons in the town. Governor Willem Jacob de Graaff received him, and at the governor’s residence he witnessed the yearly audience given to the ambassadors of the King of Kandy. The Dissava de Cocq let him attend an elephant kraal in the jungle near Jaela, of which he made a reportage of twenty-two watercolours, listing the elephants caught and their names. His sketchbooks and loose drawings, several of them topographical views of Ceylon, are today in the Rijksmuseum as well.

He drew, in his own spirit, much as a traveller today takes photographs, and the result is a rare view of the island’s daily life seen from inside a colonial household. The album lay in private hands for almost two centuries until the Rijksmuseum acquired it in 1985, and it stands now among the most original depictions of life in the Dutch East. A self-portrait in it is inscribed at Point de Galle, in his own hand, in February 1786.

The art of the album lies in its informality. Brandes worked in quick watercolour and pen, a sketchbook hand rather than a finished one, and that freedom is the point, for it let him set down what no commissioned draughtsman was asked to draw: a kitchen, a servant at work, a woman’s dress, the inside of a Colombo house. His sheets belong with de Bevere’s among the Dutch-period work that never went to an engraver, and like them they keep the freshness of the thing seen. Where the Company’s surveyors drew the island as a possession, Brandes drew it as a life lived, and the warmth of that difference is why the album stands where it does.

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. Brandes, Jan. View of Colombo from Slave Island (watercolour, 1785). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Colombo_gezien_van_het_Slaveneiland,_NG-379.jpg