Institute of Advanced Studies

Tropical landscapes and colonial discourses of abundance: Dutch still lifes from the Netherlands Indies

by Dr Susie Protschky

Still life paintings are most widely associated with seventeenth century Dutch art and culture.

It is less commonly known that still lifes were also a popular visual genre in the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia) until the twentieth century. This lecture considers what these images reveal about colonial notions of the relationship between nature, culture and civilisation. Golden Age Dutch still lifes celebrated fruits, flowers and other commodities derived from nature as objects of beauty. Historians have shown that these images were far from simple representations of everyday items. Flower pieces in particular were a reflection upon manual, intellectual and cultural labour. While modern still lifes from the Netherlands Indies retained the compositional form of seventeenth century images, their almost exclusive focus on fruit as a subject matter signalled a peculiarly colonial meaning. Golden Age still lifes frequently reflected georgic discourses on human mastery over nature, where physical and cultural labour made the earth productive. By contrast, Indies still lifes reflected colonial notions of an abundant tropics where nature flourished even in the absence of cultivation. Such perceptions justified the need for colonial discipline while minimising the role of Asian labour in generating plantation wealth for the Dutch. Colonial still life images thus represented tropical nature without the civilising touch of culture.