Abstract
This chapter focuses on the interior decoration of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Batavia homes. On the basis of probate inventories, I’ll try to shed a special light on the households of non-Dutch people, such as the Chinese and the Muslim population. While Dutch families appear to have incorporated Asian decorative objects from the beginning, a greater exchange between Western and indigenous patterns in Chinese and Asian households seems to have been taken place only in the eighteenth centuries to a larger extent. In the following, I shall reconstruct facets of domestic interior decoration and answer the question to what extent the different ethnic groups accommodated specific styles and furnishings.
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Notes
- 1.
U. Bosma and R. Raben, Being “Dutch ” in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920 (Singapore, 2008), 33–38.
- 2.
Ibid., 37–89; E. Niemeijer, Calvinisme en koloniale stadscultuur, Batavia 1619–1725 (Amsterdam, 1996), 26. See also J. Gellman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia . New Perspectives in SE Asian Studies (Madison, 2009).
- 3.
See Peter J. M. Nas, “‘Indische’ Architecture in Indonesia,” in T. DaCosta Kaufmann and M. North, ed., Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia (Amsterdam, 2015), 129–40.
- 4.
J. de Loos-Haaxmann, De landsverzameling schilderijen in Batavia . Landvoogdsportretten en Compagnieschilders (Leiden, 1941), 151–52. For Formosa see also K. Zandvliet, “Art and Cartography in the VOC Governor’s House in Taiwan,” in Mappae antiquae: liber amicorum Günter Schilder, ed. P. van Gestel-van het Schip and P. van der Krogt (t’Goy-Mouten, 2007), 579–94.
- 5.
National Archief Den Haag, NA 1.04.02, 1093. Partly published by A. M. Lubberhuizen-van Gelder, “Een oude indische inventaris,” in Cultureel Indië 8 (1946), 211–20.
- 6.
M. North, “Art Dealing as Medium of Cultural Transfer,” in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence, held at the University of Melbourne in January 2008 (Melbourne, 2009), 1027–32. For the material VOC World see: Contingent Lives. Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World, ed. N. Worden (Rondebosch, 2007), see also M. North, “Production and Reception of Art Through European Company Channels in Asia ,” in Artistic and Cultural Exchanges Between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900, ed. M. North (Farnham, 2010), 89–108, here pp. 92–96.
- 7.
J. de Loos-Haaxmann, De landsverzameling schilderijen in Batavia . Landvoogdsportretten en Compagnieschilders (Leiden, 1941), 152 ff.
- 8.
Arsip Nasional Republic of Indonesia: Schepenbank 749, see also M. North, “Art and Material Culture in the Cape Colony and Batavia in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia , ed. T. DaCosta Kaufmann and M. North (Amsterdam, 2015), 111–28.
- 9.
This is a very different situation than in the Cape, where the modest household of a Chinese woman named Thisgingno, who had no wall decoration apart from curtains, can be regarded as typical; J. C. Armstrong, “The Estate of a Chinese Woman in the Mid-Eighteenth Century at the Cape of Good Hope,” in Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World, ed. N. Worden (Cape Town , 2007), 75–90.
- 10.
Arsip Nasional, Schepenbank 1718 (1798).
- 11.
T. Randle, “Patterns of Consumption at Auctions: A Case Study of Three Estates,” in Contingent Lives. Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World, ed. N. Worden (Cape Town , 2007), 53–74.
- 12.
O. Mörke, “Stadtholder” oder “Staetholder”?: Die Funktion des Hauses Oranien und seines Hofes in der politischen Kultur der Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande im 17. Jahrhundert (Münster and Hamburg, 1997).
- 13.
E. Schmitt, et al. (ed.), Kaufleute als Kolonialherren. Die Handelswelt der Niederländer vom Kap der Guten Hoffnung bis Nagasaki 1600–1800 (Bamberg, 1988), 121–22; Hugo K’s Jacob, “Father and Son van Goens in Action: War and Diplomacy in the Relations Between the Malabar Rulers and the Dutch East India Company 1658–1682,” in Maritime Malabar and the Europeans 1500–1962, ed. Kuzhippallil Skaria Mathew (Kolkata, 2003), 313–28.
- 14.
H. Seemann, Spuren einer Freundschaft. Deutsch-Indonesische Beziehungen vom 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert (Jakarta , 2000), 45–49; Roelof van Gelder, Het Oost-Indisch avontuur: Duitsers in dienst van de VOC (1600–1800) (Nijmegen, 1997), 185–87; F. S. Gaastra, De geschiedenis van de VOC (Zutphen, 2002), 166–70; D. van Duuren, “Governors-General and Civilians. Portrait Art in the Dutch East Indies from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century ,” in Pictures from the Tropics. Paintings by Western Artists During the Dutch Colonial Period in Indonesia , ed. M.-O. Scalliet, K. van Brakel, D. van Duuren, and J. ten Kate (Wijk en Aalburg, 1999), 90–102, here pp. 95–97.
- 15.
D. Odell, “Public Identity and Material Culture in Dutch Batavia,” in Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence: The Proceedings of the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art, ed. J. Anderson (Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art, CIHA). The University of Melbourne, 13–18 January 2008 (Carlton, VIC, 2009), 253–57, here p. 255.
- 16.
Ibid., 98–100.
- 17.
M. North, “Koloniale Kunstwelten in Ostindien. Kulturelle Kommunikation im Umkreis der Handelskompanien,” in Jahrbuch für Europäische Überseegeschichte 5 (2005): 55–72, here p. 65; K. Zandvliet (ed.), De Nederlandse ontmoeting met Azië 1600–1950 (Zwolle, 2002), 120–22; and National museum Krakow, Collection Czartoryski (Warsaw, 1978), 6–21.
- 18.
T. DaCosta Kaufmann and M. North, Mediating Cultures, in Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia , ed. T. DaCosta Kaufmann and M. North (Amsterdam, 2015), 9–24.
- 19.
See, for example, D. Goodmann, and K. Norberg (eds.), Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us About the European and American Past (New York, 2007); A. Vickery, Behind Closed Doors. At Home in Georgian England (London, New Haven, 2009); and T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York, 2004), an early example of the materially connected Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds provides the catalog D. L. Krohn and Peter N. Miller (eds.), Dutch New York Between East and West. The World of Margrieta Van Varick (New York, 2010). See also M. North, “Towards a Global Material Culture . Domestic Interiors in the Atlantic and Other Worlds,” in Cultural Exchange and Consumption Patterns in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. V. Hyden-Hanscho, R. Pieper, and W. Stangl. The Eighteenth Century and the Habsburg Monarchy International Series, Vol. 6 (Bochum 2013), 81–96.
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North, M. (2019). Domestic Interiors in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Batavia. In: Reyes, R. (eds) Art, Trade, and Cultural Mediation in Asia, 1600–1950. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57237-0_5
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