Johannes Vingboons · Malaka Talwatte

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.

A seventeenth-century bird's-eye watercolour of Colombo and its harbour, with ships offshore. — Bird's-eye view of Colombo and environs (c. 1665), watercolour · Nationaal Archief, The Hague. Source

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, one series of which passed to Queen Christina of Sweden and thence to the Vatican. 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.

How to cite this profile