Jan Brandes (Dutch, 1743–1808) was a Lutheran minister, draftsman, and diarist whose travels through South Africa, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and Batavia (Jakarta) produced one of the most extensive visual records of Dutch colonial life in the late 18th century. Trained in theology rather than the arts, Brandes nevertheless cultivated a keen observational style, filling sketchbooks with landscapes, natural specimens, portraits, and depictions of everyday scenes. His watercolors reflect the Enlightenment drive to classify and document the world, but they also expose the entanglements of religion, trade, and empire.
Embedded within the machinery of Dutch imperialism, his work also served as a visual reinforcement of the very systems it observed. Preserved today in the Rijksmuseum, Brandes’s drawings offer insight into the colonial gaze and its aesthetic strategies.
