Johannes Vingboons

Johannes Vingboons drew Ceylon without ever seeing it. Working in Amsterdam, the son of the painter David Vinckboons, he turned the sketches, coastal profiles and reports that VOC masters and merchants brought home into finished watercolour views and maps, and among the hundreds he made are views of Colombo and Galle and charts of the island.

The method had a workshop behind it. Vingboons had grown up in his father’s studio in Amsterdam, learned to draw among the designs it turned out, and from about 1640 worked for the great map publisher Joan Blaeu, making city elevations, ground-plans, coastal profiles and sea charts from the papers that Company masters, helmsmen and merchants brought home. His idiom is the cartographic view: the town seen from an imagined height as a bird would see it, or ranged along the waterline as a pilot would, laid down in clean pen and coloured wash, every bastion and street legible, the whole ordered for information before atmosphere. It is view-making as the Company needed it, and his sheets carried the look of Colombo, Galle and a hundred other posts into the bound atlases of Europe, among them the celebrated Blaeu-Van der Hem atlas now at Vienna.

His method was the opposite of the traveller-artist’s: exact secondhand reconstruction rather than eyewitness record, yet for a European public it was often the first sight of these Dutch harbours in the East. His sheets survive in the Vingboons atlas in the Dutch national archive and in the great bound atlases his work reached. He belongs on the roster as the Dutch age’s counterpart to the later view-makers, the man who fixed the look of Company Ceylon for those at home.

Sources

1. Vingboons, Johannes. The Vingboons Atlas of VOC and WIC maps and views. Nationaal Archief, The Hague. https://www.nationaalarchief.nl/beleven/verhalenarchief/johannes-vingboons
2. Trading posts of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), views after Vingboons, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/object/VOC-vestigingen--fcafe9589e99beb3a0c02ac42e7f9e56