Conclusion

The mooi Indie genre persisted for a remarkably long period in Dutch colonial art, from the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century.⁵⁸ However, with the rise of alternative visions of the Indies’ present and future, particularly the Indonesian nationalist movement, romanticised colonial landscapes began to attract criticism.

Sudjojono understood how images of the tropics not only mirrored but were also con­stitutive of Dutch imperial culture. Paintings of ‘the beautiful Indies’ offered an historically unchanging and thematically uniform vision of colonised landscapes that avoided the transformative impact of Dutch rule on local environments, economies and societies. The invisibility of plantations in such images, and the painterly preference for subsistence agriculture, elided the complexities and conflicts of the colonial present in favour of an idealised, pre-colonial past. The contrast between the images of tropical and European landscapes that mooi Indie paintings delivered gave visual substance to the stadial models of civilisation and theories of environmental determinism that underpinned justifications for colonial rule over a more ‘backward’ tropics.

Photographic views of Indies landscapes, by contrast, revealed and in fact celebrated the changes wrought by Dutch colonisation of the environment, usually with an emphasis on the progressive, benevolent outcomes of Dutch rule. That photography proliferated in Indies print and visual culture at precisely the time when liberal political reforms (the Ethical Policy) were introduced at the turn of the twentieth century helps contextualise the optimistic tone of these images. Photographs of Indies landscapes acknowledged the foundations of the colonial economy, but they did so in a manner that reinforced the moral rectitude of Dutch rule. Coercion and exploitation were visible in these images, if one looked at them with critical eyes, but it was rarely the explicit aim of colonial photo­graphers to foreground these aspects of plantation life, at least not for a wide audience.

The dissonance of colonists’ paintings and photographs with economic realities, and with the lived experiences of both the colonists and the indigenous people who inhabited Indies landscapes, suggests a deep ambivalence in European visual culture about imperi­alism in the tropics. Images of Indies landscapes thus need to be viewed against the grain of pictorial surfaces, and examined within the context of wider discourses about the environment in Dutch colonial culture.

Notes

1 Thanks to Adam Clulow, Ian Copland, Ernest Koh, Noah Shenker and Alistair Thomson at Monash University for their constructive criticism of an earlier draft of this chapter.

2 Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1580--1740 (Oxford and New York, 1989), pp. 6-11.

3 On the Cultivation System, see Cornelis Fasseur, The Politics of Colonial Exploitation: Java, the Dutch and the Cultivation System, R.E. Elson and Ary Kraal (trans.) (Ithaca, NY, 1992), pp. 145-161; R.E. Elson, Village Java under the Cultivation System, 1830--1870 (Sydney, 1994), pp. 99, 157; M.C. Rick- lefs, A History of Modern Indonesia since c.

4 William J. O’Malley, ‘Plantations 1830-1940: An Overview’, in Anne Booth, WJ. O’Malley and Anna Weidemann (eds), Indonesian Economic History in the Dutch Colonial Era (New Haven, 1990), pp. 136-170, 136.

5 Anne Booth, ‘Foreign Trade and Domestic Development in the Colonial Economy’, in Anne Booth, WJ. O’Malley and Anna Weidemann (eds), Indonesian Economic History in the Dutch Colonial Era, pp. 267-295, 281; and, in the same volume, Angus Maddison, ‘Dutch Colonialism in Indonesia: A Comparative Perspective’, pp. 322-335, 325.

6 Elsbeth Locher-Scholten, Ethiek in fragmenten: Vijf studies over koloniaal denken en doen van Nederlanders in de Indonesische Archipel 1877--1942 (Utrecht, 1981); Janny de Jong, Van batig slot naar ereschuld: De discussie over de financiele verhouding tussen Nederland en Indie en de hervorming van de Nederlandse koloniale politick 1860-1900 (‘s-Gravenhage, 1989); Marieke Bloembergen and Remco Raben (eds), Het koloniale beschavingsoffensief: Wegen naar het nieuwe Indie, 1890-1950 (Leiden, 2009).

7 Henk Schulte Nordholt, ‘A Geneaology of Violence', in Freek Colombijn and J. Thomas Lindblad (eds), Roots of Violence in Indonesia: Contemporary Violence in Historical Perspective (Leiden, 2002), pp. 33-61, 36.

8 J.S. Furnivall, Netherlands Indies: A Study of a Plural Economy (Cambridge, 1939), pp. 174-224; Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870-1979 (New Haven, 1985); Jan Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast: Plantation Society and the Colonial State in Southeast Asia (Delhi,

1990) ; Vincent J.H. Houben and J. Thomas Lindblad et al., Coolie Labour in Colonial Indonesia: A Study of Labour Relations in the Outer Islands, c. 1900-1940 (Wiesbaden, 1999).

9 Nancy Lee Peluso, ‘The History of State Forest Management in Colonial Java', Forest and Conservation History, Vol.

10 Peluso, ‘The History of State Forest Management', pp. 68, 72; Boomgaard, ‘Forest Management and Exploitation', pp. 11, 13.

11 Karl Pelzer, Planter and Peasant: Colonial Policy and the Agrarian Struggle in East Sumatra, 1863-1947 (The Hague, 1978), pp. 53-57, 67-82, 88-140.

12 Thee Kian-Wie, Plantation Agriculture and Export Growth: An Economic History of East Sumatra, 1863-1942 (Jakarta, 1977).

13 Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast; Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation; Houben et al., Coolie Labour in Colonial Indonesia.

14 Peter Boomgaard, ‘Oriental Nature, its Friends and its Enemies: Conservation of Nature in Late Colonial Indonesia, 1889-1949', Environment and History, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1999), pp. 257-293; ‘Sacred Trees and Haunted Forests: Indonesia, particularly Java, 19th and 20th centuries', in Ole Brunn and Arne Kalland (eds), Asian Perspectives of Nature (Copenhagen, 1992), pp. 47-62.

15 Leonard Blusse, ‘The Story of an Ecological Disaster: The Dutch East India Company and Batavia (1619-1799)', in Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and the Dutch in VOC Batavia (Dordrecht, 1986), pp. 15-34; Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge, 1995).

16 Nancy Lee Peluso, Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java (Berkeley, 1992); Paul Jepson and Robert J. Whittaker, ‘Histories of Protected Areas: Internationalisation of Con­servationist Values and their Adoption in the Netherlands Indies (Indonesia)', Environment and History, Vol. 8 (2002), pp. 129-172.

17 Jepson and Whittaker, ‘Histories of Protected Areas', p. 132.

18 Felix Driver and Luciana Martins, ‘Views and Visions of the Tropical World', in Felix Driver and Luciana Martins (eds), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago and London, 2005), pp.

19 David Arnold, ‘Inventing Tropicality', in The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford, 1996), pp. 141-169; ‘“Illusory Riches”: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840-1950', Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2000), pp. 6-18; The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science 1800-1856 (Delhi, 2005); Denis Cosgrove, ‘Tropic and Tropicality', in Felix Driver and Luciana Martins (eds), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago and London, 2005), pp. 197-216.

20 Cosgrove, ‘Tropic and Tropicality', p. 197.

21 Arnold, ‘“Illusory Riches”', p. 7.

22 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, NC, and London, 1995), p. 99.

23 Susie Protschky, Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (Leiden, 2011), pp. 32, 74, 79, 81.

24 Ulbe Bosma, Indiegangers: Verhalen van.Nederlanders die naar Indie trokken (Amsterdam, 2010), pp. 12, 80, 260.

25 Ibid, chap. 4 and pp. 8-9, 14-15, 152, 154, 167, 179, 186.

26 Ibid., pp. 9, 30.

27 For the few exceptions, see Protschky, Images of the Tropics, pp. 88-89.

28 Koos van Brakel, ‘“Mooi Indie”-kunst: Een koloniaal medium?', in Meta Knol, Remco Raben and Kitty Zijlmans (eds), Beyond the Dutch: Indonesie, Nederland en de beeldende kunsten van 1900 tot nu (Amsterdam and Utrecht, 2009), pp. 50-59, 53, 55.

29 Protschky, Images of the Tropics, pp. 17-18.

30 Leo Haks and Guus Maris, Lexicon of Foreign Artists who Visualized Indonesia, 1600--1950 (Utrecht,

1995).

31 Andrew Sayers, ‘The Shaping of Australian Landscape Painting', in New Worlds from Old: Australian and American Landscapes (Canberra and Connecticut, 1998), pp. 53-69, 58-61; in the same volume, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, ‘ “All Nature Here is New to Art”: Painting and the American landscape 1800-1900', pp. 71-91, 77-79; Jeanette Hoorn, Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape (Fremantle, WA, 2007), pp.

32 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 21.

33 See, for example, Tim Bonyhady, ‘A Painter's Delight', in The Colonial Earth (Carlton South, 2000), pp. 67-100; Hoorn, Australian Pastoral, pp. 10, 62-63.

34 For example, see the discussion of sugar plantations being replaced by banana estates as slavery was abolished in Jamaica, in Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC, and London, 2006), pp. 27-91.

35 Protschky, Images of the Tropics, pp. 17, 79, 99; Van Brakel, ‘“Mooi Indie”-kunst', pp. 53, 55.

36 Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chi­cago and London, 1999); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton and Oxford, 2005).

37 Siep Stuurman, ‘Wacht op onze daden': Het liberalisme en de vernieuwing van de Nederlandse staat (Amsterdam, 1992); Henk te Velde, Gemeenschapszin en plichtsbesef: Liberalisme en nationalisme in Nederland, 1870-1918 (The Hague, 1992).

38 Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, pp. 30, 106.

39 Ibid., pp. 9, 11, 18, 20, 38, 41, 192, 194, 200; Pitts, A Turn to Empire, pp. 5, 6.

40 Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native: A Study of the Image of the Malays, Filipinos and Javanese from the 16th to the 20th Century and its Function in the Ideology of Colonial Capitalism (London,

1977) ; Victor Savage, Western Impressions of Nature and Landscape in Southeast Asia (Singapore, 1984), pp. 24, 69-115.

41 Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast, p. 27; Jan Breman, Labour Migration and Rural Transformation in Colonial Asia (Amsterdam, 1990), pp. 16, 40-41.

42 Jan Poortenaar, An Artist in Java and Other Islands of Indonesia (Oxford, 1990 [1928]), p. 26.

43 Ibid., p. 41.

44 Frances Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900-1942 (Amsterdam, 1995), pp. 119-150; Adrian Vickers, Bali: A Paradise Created (Singapore, 1996 [1989]) pp. 89-91, 94.

45 Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation, pp. 5, 38; Breman, Labour Migration and Rural Transformation in Colonial Asia, pp. 6, 11, 39.

46 William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, ‘Rubber and the Environment in Malaysia', in Environment and Empire (Oxford, 2007), pp. 231-250, 239; Jeroen Touwen, Extremes in the Archipelago: Trade and Economic Development in the Outer Islands of Indonesia, 1900-1942 (Leiden, 2001), p. 371.

47 Beinart and Hughes, ‘Rubber and the Environment in Malaysia', pp. 242-243; Pelzer, Planter and Peasant.

48 De Jong, Van batig slot naar ereschuld; Locher-Scholten, Ethiek in fragmenten; Bloembergen and Raben, Het koloniale beschavingsoffensief

49 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis, 1988), p. 3; Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago, 1997), p. 70; Eli­zabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford, 2001), p. 187.

50 Anneke Groeneveld, ‘Photography in Aid of Science', in Toekang Potret: 100 Years of Photography in the Dutch Indies 1839-1939 (Amsterdam and Leiden, 1989), p. 16.

51 Protschky, Images of the Tropics, chap. 3.

52 Peter Boomgaard and Janneke van Dijk, Het Indie Boek (Zwolle, 2001), p. 155; Ulbe Bosma, Juan Giusti-Cordero and G. Roger Knight (eds), Sugarlandia Revisited: Sugar and Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800 to 1940 (New York and Oxford, 2007).

53 Liesbeth Ouwehand, Herinneringen in Beeld: Fotoalbums uit Nederlands-Indie (Leiden, 2009), pp. 137-190.

54 Marieke Bloembergen, Colonial Spectacles: The Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies at the World Exhi­bitions, 1880-1931 (Singapore, 2006); Laetitia Dujardin, Ethnics and Trade: Photography and the Colonial Exhibitions in Amsterdam, Antwerp and Brussels (Amsterdam, 2007); Ouwehand, Herinneringen in Beeld, pp. 191-220.

55 See, for example, Ch. Bernard, Handelingen van het Thee-Congres met Tentoonstelling Gehouden te Bandoeng van 21 tot 26 Juni 1924 (Weltevreden, 1924).

56 Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast; Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation; Houben et al., Coolie Labour in Colonial Indonesia.

57 See the two photographs on the title page of Breman, Taming the Coolie Beast, and plate 6 in Houben et al., Coolie Labour in Colonial Indonesia.

58 Protschky, Images of the Tropics.

59 S. Sudjojono, ‘Seni lukis di Indonesia sekarang dan yang akan datang', in Seni Lukis, Kesenian dan Seniman (Yogyakarta, 1946), pp. 1-8, translated by and quoted in Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change (Ithaca, NY, 1967), pp. 195, 196.

60 Holt, Art in Indonesia, p. 198.

Further reading

Arnold, David, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800--1856 (Delhi, 2005).

Beinart, William, and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford, 2007).

Driver, Felix, and Luciana Martins (eds), Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire (Chicago and London,

2005).

Gouda, Frances, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the.Netherlands Indies, 1900--1942 (Amsterdam, 1995).

Grove, Richard, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600 1860 (Cambridge, 1995).

KIT Tropenmuseum, Photographs of the Netherlands East Indies at the Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam, 2012).

Museum Volkenkunde, Toekang Potret: 100 Years of Photography in the Dutch Indies 1839--1939 (Amsterdam and Leiden, 1989).

Protschky, Susie, Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (Leiden, 2011).

Ricklefs, M.C., A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200 (3rd edn) (Basingstoke, 2001).

Scalliet, Marie-Odette, Koos van Brakel, David van Duuren and Jeanette ten Kate, Pictures from the Tropics: Paintings by Western Artists during the Dutch Colonial Period in Indonesia (Amsterdam, 1999).

Taylor, Jean Gelman, Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (New Haven and London, 2003).

Thompson, Krista A., An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC, and London, 2006).

Tobin, Beth Fowkes, Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters 1760--1820 (Philadelphia,

2005).

Zandvliet, Kees, The Dutch Encounter with Asia 1600--1950 (Zwolle and Amsterdam, 2002).