THE LUTHERAN MINISTER’S PICTURES (2)
THE Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which opened in 1800, is a national institution dedicated to arts, crafts and history. It is the most popular museum in the Netherlands and welcomes almost 2.5 million visitors a year.
About 8 000 of its 1 million objects are currently on display, including several masterpieces from the golden age of Dutch painting.
Like most museums, the bulk of its collections are kept in storage and will never be seen by the public. Six years ago, the curators decided to make its hidden treasures available for download via an innovative web platform, named Rijksstudio, starting with 125 000 high-resolution images and adding thousands more each year until the entire collection is available in digitised form.
What makes this site especially attractive is that the works are available free of restrictions or cost, with added opportunities to create new products by remixing the images.
To go back to last week’s topic, the Rijksstudio collection includes some works relating to South Africa, including watercolour sketches by amateur painter Jan Brandes (17431808), a former Dutch Lutheran pastor in Batavia, who spent nine months on the farm Vergenoegd on Eerste River in 1786-87.
These images, which were held privately in Sweden for two centuries have, so far, received little exposure in South Africa.
Brandes, an unhappy widower, produced most of his 600 works in the east. His approach was of an educated outsider recording exotic scenes, private interiors and flora and fauna in the way modern travellers take photographs.
He resigned his post in 1785 and was on his way home to the Netherlands with his young son when he broke his journey at the Cape. His host was a prominent German Lutheran, Johan Georg Lochner (1740-1805) who arrived as a soldier in 1765, worked as a wagoner and tailor and married a widow before taking out burgher papers in 1771.
Having chosen his wife wisely, Lochner prospered. He took transfer of the well-known property Vergenoegd, near modern Faure, from Johannes Nicolaas Colyn in June 1782 and obtained the loan farm Zandbergh in 1784.
He was an officer in the burgher cavalry and enjoyed an affluent lifestyle when the artist joined his household in 1786.
The farm’s isolation restricted Brandes to some degree, but his surviving works include watercolours of Cape birds and flowers and panoramic views of the Hottentots Holland valley and the challenging pass that led over the mountains to Swellendam. Some of the farming scenes include images of slaves wearing jackets and pantaloons and Khoisan herdsmen dressed in traditional skin clothing.
Brandes left the Cape in March 1787 and settled in Sweden, where he married again.
Lochner was obliged to sell Vergenoegd after his wife died in 1788 and never regained his former prosperity.
The Rijksstudio collection includes some works relating to South Africa, including watercolour sketches by Jan Brandes