Raden Saleh Sjarif Bustaman (c. 1811-1880) was born into an aristocratic family on Java, then part of the colony of the Dutch East Indies. Saleh was sent to the Netherlands in 1829 to be trained as an artist. He ultimately ended up staying in the Hague for ten years, then travelling to Paris and to Germany. His stay in Dresden was where Saleh found his fascination for Romantic landscapes, partially through his friendship with the Norwegian painter Johann Christian Dahl. Though eventually sent back to Java by the Dutch colonial authorities, Saleh did bring his fascination with Romanticism with him, painting magnificent landscapes, animal battles, and colonial subjects. His unique compositions – the product of the colonised, in the manner of the coloniser – brings about an intriguing case study I discussed in my paper “Romanticism beyond Europe: Raden Saleh and Dutch colonialism” at the conference Romanticism’s Colonial Legacies: In and Beyond Europe, organised at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt in 2024.
Dr. Marte Stinis 