Johannes Rach

Johannes Rach, born at Copenhagen in 1720 and schooled by a court painter, was a member of the Haarlem Guild of St Luke before he joined the Company as a gunner and left for the Indies in 1762. Across some twenty years he made hundreds of washed-ink topographical drawings, running a workshop of assistants whose hands are hard to tell from his own; he rose to major in the artillery and died at Batavia in 1783, his output vast and his personal touch often uncertain.

His workshop supplied topographical views of the island, the studio extending its reach far beyond its master’s own travels. Three views of Colombo and one of the palace at Kandy, made by his assistants, are held today at the museum in Djakarta, a small Ceylon holding within a larger body of work. His careful documentary manner, passed to the hands he trained, makes even the studio copies a reliable witness to what stood where.

His medium tells the manner. The washed-ink drawing, a grey wash laid over a fine pen outline, was the working language of the topographer, made to fix a place clearly rather than to charm, and Rach’s studio turned it out on a near-industrial scale for a market grown hungry for views of the East. The Ceylon sheets belong to that trade, prospects of Colombo and Kandy produced to meet a collector’s demand at Batavia and in Europe. Their value is documentary before it is personal, and the uncertainty over which lines are the master’s and which a pupil’s matters less than the accuracy the whole workshop kept.

Sources

1. de Silva, R.K., and W.G.M. Beumer. Illustrations and Views of Dutch Ceylon 1602–1796. London and Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988.
2. Topographical views of Colombo and the palace at Kandy from the Rach workshop, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and the Museum Nasional, Jakarta.