Art, Architecture and Visual Culture
This chapter charts the growing, diversifying circulation of the Dutch monarch’s image for different audiences and purposes across the early twentieth century. It discusses Queen Wilhelmina (r. 1898–1948) and Queen Juliana (r. 1948–80), portraits of whom played an important ceremonial role at government and viceregal occasions in the East Indies, and were also adapted in creative ways by different ethnic groups as effigies at pageants. In demonstrating how the queens’ portraits were used in imperial rituals, rather than simply attending to representation, this chapter addresses scholarship on royal tours, mass spectacle and empire that has to date overlooked the role of photography in forging connections between monarchs and their colonial subjects. The chapter assesses colonial audiences’ engagement with European monarchies beyond the parameters of the ‘royal tour’, which was actually uncommon in most empires other than British overseas possessions.
This chapter examines continuity and change in photographs of royal celebrations made by Dutch authorities during the long decolonisation of the Netherlands East Indies/Indonesia. It discusses the celebration of Queen Juliana in Dutch New Guinea (1948–62). It also presents evidence that, during the Dutch military actions (1945–50) that preceded Indonesia’s independence, royal celebrations were an important opportunity for Dutch soldiers to celebrate victories and claim territorial sovereignty for the Netherlands. Royal celebrations were also instrumental in the battle for civilian hearts and minds, particularly to demonstrate the benevolence of Dutch soldiers to Indonesians. This chapter reveals that Wilhelmina was not just a hero of the Second World War in the Netherlands, but also very much a soldiers’ queen in Indonesia during the dying days of the Dutch empire in Asia.
This chapter reveals how colonial subjects recorded their own participation in royal celebrations as amateur photographers, and collected mass-produced photographs of the Dutch monarchy, thus placing the East Indies and family events at the centre of historic, imperial occasions. It shows how family photography emerged as an important medium for diverse colonial populations to forge a cosmopolitan identity predicated on support for an institution that was still mostly parochial (a national monarchy) at the beginning of Wilhelmina’s reign in 1898, but emphatically international (in terms of an empire) by the 1940s, when Wilhelmina was in her maturity. It also explores the connections between the emergence of family photography and the popularisation of the Dutch monarchy during the 1930s, particularly through the marriage and childbearing of Crown Princess Juliana, when the image of the ‘ordinary’ monarchy first emerged.
This chapter analyses photographs of Wilhelmina’s subjects participating in koninginnedag festivals from both the East Indies and the Netherlands. Photographs of games and competitions, traditional dances adapted to new purposes and the distinctive costumes of folk and ethnic ‘types’ at royal celebrations appeared frequently in the photographs of European elites throughout the Dutch colonial world. The chapter explains the intellectual movements in ethnography and ‘folk studies’ that underpinned this photographic convergence in Wilhelmina’s lifetime, and the political role ascribed to the monarch as a benevolent unifying force that transcended geographical distance and racial difference. This chapter also attends to representations of the monarch’s body – that of a European, female king – to explain how photography mediated Wilhelmina’s and Juliana’s relationships to their subjects. In having themselves photographed wearing folk costumes, Dutch royals bodily identified with and mirrored the diversity they were expected to recognise in their Dutch subjects. By contrast, the queen never physically embodied the ethnic and religious diversity of her colonial subjects.
The personal association between Queen Wilhelmina and the Ethical Policy, a doctrine of liberal reform that she announced early in her reign (in 1901), is examined in this chapter for how it manifested in royal celebrations. At the start of her reign, lanterns and gaslights at royal pageants marked a continuation of centuries-old festival practices in both the East Indies and the Netherlands. However, the electrification of the Indies proceeded apace under Wilhelmina’s rule. This chapter uses published commemorative books, photographs taken by colonial officials who orchestrated festivals, and amateur private photographs to show how the electrification of the Indies was photographed on annual Queen’s Day celebrations and at other milestones of Wilhelmina’s reign. The spectacular uses of night photography in particular gave colonial photographers an opportunity to show how ‘modern’ the East Indies was, more so even than the Netherlands, and thus to celebrate the ‘progress’ made under the Ethical Policy. Photography articulated a complex association between modernisation, benevolent Dutch colonialism and the monarchy in ways that refused the peripheral status of the Indies relative to the metropole.
This chapter introduces Queen Wilhelmina, a monarch who never toured her colonies, yet was better known and celebrated there than any of her predecessors and thus represents perhaps the only truly imperial monarch in Dutch history. It examines the development of mass photography in the Netherlands East Indies (colonial Indonesia) during Wilhelmina’s reign (1898–1948). It was photography above all other media that ‘globalised’ the Dutch monarchy for colonial subjects in a way that enabled a wide range of her subjects, from Indigenous royals to ordinary people, to creatively respond to and interact with this important imperial institution.
Photographic subjects examines photography at royal celebrations during the
reigns of Wilhelmina (1898–1948) and Juliana (1948–80), a period spanning the
zenith and fall of Dutch rule in Indonesia. It is the first monograph in English
on the Dutch monarchy and the Netherlands’ modern empire in the age of mass and
amateur photography.
This book reveals how Europeans and Indigenous people
used photographs taken at Queen’s Day celebrations to indicate the ritual uses
of portraits of Wilhelmina and Juliana in the colonies. Such photographs were
also objects of exchange across imperial networks. Photograph albums were sent
as gifts by Indigenous royals in ‘snapshot diplomacy’ with the Dutch monarchy.
Ordinary Indonesians sent photographs to Dutch royals in a bid for recognition
and subjecthood. Professional and amateur photographers associated the Dutch
queens with colonial modernity and with modes of governing difference across an
empire of discontiguous territory and ethnically diverse people. The gendered
and racial dimensions of Wilhelmina’s and Juliana’s engagement with their
subjects emerge uniquely in photographs, which show these two women as female
kings who related to their Dutch and Indigenous subjects in different visual
registers.
Photographic subjects advances methods in the use of photographs
for social and cultural history, reveals the entanglement of Dutch and
Indonesian histories in the twentieth century, and provides a new interpretation
of Wilhelmina and Juliana as imperial monarchs. The book is essential for
scholars and students of colonial history, South-east Asian and Indonesian
studies, and photography and visual studies.
This chapter examines diplomatic relations between the Dutch monarchy and the rulers of Central Java’s so-called ‘Princely States’ which had, since the 1830s, effectively been vassals to the Dutch crown. Just as Queen Wilhelmina never toured her colonies, Central Java’s royals avoided travelling to the Dutch court, and instead used photographs to negotiate their representations to the Dutch monarchy. Pakubuwono X, Hamengku Buwono VIII and Pakualam VII sent luxurious photograph albums featuring themselves and/or their courts as gifts to Queen Wilhelmina and Crown Princess Juliana to mark royal milestones. This chapter reveals how these Javanese kings and princes exerted the power of refusal in not meeting Dutch monarchs in person, instead using photographs to present themselves as modern, innovative rulers with formidable dynasties and impressive courts.
This chapter shows that the Prince Regent's desire to appropriate the Peninsular, Trafalgar and Waterloo victories, resulted in patronage for a genre of battle painting not legitimised by the tenets of academic theory. The Prince Regent's decision to display Lawrence's portraits rather than his battle paintings for his Waterloo gallery has been noted. One High Art form of military painting which had flourished in England in the late eighteenth century was the exemplum virtutis painting such as Benjamin West's Death of General Wolfe or John Singleton Copely's Death of Major Peirson. The British Institution (BI) for Promoting the Fine Arts in the United Kingdom, had been formed in May 1805 by important members of the Royal Academy and members of the aristocracy who were patrons and amateurs of art. The aristocratic connoisseurs of the BI showed themselves out of sympathy with the majority of urban middle-class art consumers.
The theme of anglicisation is a familiar one throughout late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British imperial history. Anglicisation was revived after the second Anglo-Boer War, motivated this time by the British government's attempt to foster white racial harmony and create a new rural order in South Africa. The politicisation of South African soldier settlement was not, however, centred on the conflict between the dominion government and veterans' organisations for participation in and control of post-war policy. Nationalist politicians saw the development of irrigation schemes as the country's salvation and the solution to the poor white problem. Throughout 1917 and 1918 the South African government remained resolute in its determination not to introduce special soldier settlement projects, state-aided migration programmes or participate in an imperial free passage scheme. The founding in 1920 of the 1820 Association marked a new chapter in British immigration to South Africa.