People as property

Oxford Art Journal

Volumn 25, Issue 1, 2002, Pages

  Ford, Charles ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 62649132447     PISSN: 01426540     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/oxartj/25.1.1     Document Type: Review

References (35)

1. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Zone Books: New York, 1995), p. 93.
2. 'Te dienen als boekhouder of schrijver en Const schilder'; for the full contract see A. Bredius, Kunstler Inventare, II, pp. 431-6.
3. 'Ook sal hem toegevoegd worden een jongen ten synen diensten, te tracteren niet als Slaaf maar als een kind en over deselve niet hart te syn', Bredius, pp. 431-6.
4. It should not be forgotten how highly esteemed personal service was in traditional European cultures, for example court culture, where the noblest men of a nation would compete to carry the nightsoil of their monarch. Witsen was granting Valkenburgh the privilege of traditional service in place of the modern but unspecific status of picture supplier.
5. Discussed by Chr. P. van Eeghen, see note 8.
6. Van Gook, De Nieuwe Schouburg der Nederlandtsche Kunstshilders en Schilderessen, II (1751), p. 484. We cannot ignore the possibility that this might also be true, but truer as an aspect of the type of the weak artist of low self-esteem which shapes Van Gool's biography of Valkenburg.
7. Van Gook, De Nieuwe Schouburg der Nederlandtsche Kunstshilders en Schilderessen, p. 485.
8. There is little published on Valkenburg and his Suriname adventure. Useful introductions can be found in: Chr. P. van Eeghen, 'Dirk Valkenburg-boekhouder-schrijver-kunstshilder voor Jonas Witsen', Oud Holland, 1946, pp. 58-69;
9. A. van Schendel, 'Een stille plantage in Suriname door Dirk Valkenburg' (1707), Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, no. 3, 1964, pp. 80-6.
10. See Van Eeghen, pp. 63-5. The collection seems to have remained largely intact even after the family moved house following Witsen's death and was not broken up until the 1790 sale, which followed the death of Witsen's grandson, also Jonas Witsen. Van Schendel makes it clear that keeping the pictures together was the express wish of both Witsen and his widow. Valkenburg, on the other hand, seems to have kept no memorial of his time in Surinam. At his death in 1721 no West Indian subjects are listed among his goods- but then he was contracted not to sell such images to anyone other than Witsen.
11. See J. M. Postma, The Dutch and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1990);
12. C. C. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and in the Guianas, 1680-1795, (Van Gorcum: Assen, 1985).
13. For a study of the earlier period see Van den Boogaart and P. C. Emmer, 'The Dutch Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1596-1650', in H. A. Gemery and J. S. Hogendorn (eds. ), The Uncommon Market (New York: 1979), pp. 354-7.
14. P. Vandebroeck, Beeld van de andere, vertoog over het zelf, Exhibition Catalogue (Antwerp: 1987).
15. See Z. Z. Filipszak, Picturing Art in Antwerp (Princeton: 1987).
16. See R. Meischke and H. E. Reeser (eds. ), Het Trippenguis te Amsterdam (Amsterdam: 1983).
17. H. R. Hoetinck (ed. ), Zo wijd de Wereld strekt, Exhibition Catalogue (The Hague: 1979).
18. E. Van den Bogaart, H. R. Hoetinck, and P. J. Whitehead (eds. ), Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen 1604-74. A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil (The Hague: 1979).
19. See J. C. Overvoorde and P. de Roo de La Faille et al. , De Gebouwen van de Oost-Indische Compagnie en de West-Indische Compagnie in Nederland (Utrecht: 1928) for information on the various VOC and WIC houses in the various cities in the UP. Most were housed in properties provided by the municipalities: former militia buildings, defunct religious buildings or, in the case of the Middelburg WIC, in the Engelsch huys, the former apartments of the Merchant Adventurers company. In the case of the WIC there was little capital investment apart from a few warehouses (frequently sub-let during the period) and provision for shipbrokerage such as slaughterhouses and arsenals. In Middleburg a 'bequaem fournais' was ordered in 1626 to smelt the anticipated silver and gold. Compared to the VOC, whose buildings dominated Amsterdam harbour, the WIC was barely visible. A lively picture of the VOC building is drawn by Edward Browne (son of Sir Thomas) whose letters from Holland are reproduced in C. D. van Strien, British Travellers in Holland during the Stuart Period (Leiden: 1993), pp. 237-97; Browne describes a mummified Indian in a canoe hung over the entrance. Images of the African black were, however, ubiquitous in the corporate imagery of the Catholic Church- especially in connection with themes relating to the Five Continents.
20. The Amsterdam Town Hall (now the Royal Palace) is also typical in its eschewing the particular and personal for the general and the abstract in its various spaces. A world map on the floor of the Citizen's Hall, astrological and classicising statuary, Old Testament and classical themes in oil paintings in the inner rooms. And this reticence is not so much Dutch as typical of corporations, nor is it exclusive to urban patrician public spaces of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When, in Howard's End, Margaret Schlegel visits Mr Wilcox at his office at the Imperial and West African Rubber Company, she is disappointed to find it more Imperial than African. Two maps of the continent, one 'looking like a whale marked out for blubber', are the sole indication of the African link. (E. M. Forster, Howards End [Harmondsworth], p. 183. )
21. See L. R. Priester, De Nederlandse houding ten aanzien ran de slavenhandel en slavenerij, 1596-1863, MA thesis, Erasmus University, Rotterdam 1986; reference in Postma, see note 10, above.
22. See E. van den Boogaart and P. C. Emmer, pp. 354-7.
23. For early condemnation of the slave trade see Priester. A. N. Paasman, Reinhart: Nederlandse literatuur en slavernij ten tijde van de Verlichting (Leiden, 1984), remains the best broad introduction to the debates throughout the period.
24. Paasman, pp. 98-9.
25. Two excellent recent accounts of Capitein include: Kwesi Kwaa Prah, Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein: A Critical Study of an 18th-century African (Braamfontein: 1989);
26. David Nii Anum Kpobi, Mission in Chains. The Life, Theology and Ministry of the ex-slave Jacobus E. J. Capitein (1717-1747) with a Translation of his Major Publications (Zoetemeer: 1993). Prah's short book is an attempt to figure Capitein into a post-colonial history; Kpobi's published PhD thesis is a 'defence' of Capitein against accounts of his 'failure' as a man and a Christian and is more a contribution to church history.
27. See discussion in Prah, Jacobus Eliza Johannes Capitein pp. 37 et seq.
28. Velse was an enthusiastic proponent of converting the heathens. He apparently published a study of missionary work in the Indies in 1739, this study is referred to by Prah; I have been unable to trace it.
29. Prah shows how Capitein became a model of the ineducability of the black for later historians/ethnographers.
30. See the later texts which describe him to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readers cited by Prah, pp. 19-35.
31. Johan Picardt, Korte bescrhryvinge van eenige vergetene en verborgene antiquiteten der provintien en landen gelegen tusschen de Noord-Zee, de Yssel, Emse en Lippe, (Amsterdam, 1660). In his Race: The History of an Idea in the West (John Hopkins University Press, 1996), Ivan Hanniford marks the 'racialising moment' as 1684 with the publication of François Bernier's Nouvelle Division de la terre par les differents espèces ou races qui l'habitent. The word 'slave' was a racial term in Latin- sclarus, a Slav.
32. Genesis 9:18-27.
33. Picardt, Korte bescrhryvinge van eenige vergetene en verborgene antiquiteten der provintien en landen gelegen tusschen de Noord-Zee, de Yssel, Emse en Lippe, p. 8.
34. Willem Bosman, Nauwkeurige beschryvinge van de Guinese Goud- Tand- en Slave-Kust, nevens alle desselfs landen (Utrecht, 1704). This immensely popular work argued for the inferiority and loathsomeness of the black from first-hand evidence- while also criticising some features of European exploitation/ contamination.
35. For a comprehensive introduction to the picture and its commissioning see Robert Wenley, 'Robert Paston and the Yarmouth Collection', Norfolk Archaeology, vol. XLI, pt. II, 1991, pp. 113-32.