The painting Ministry of Finance on Waterloo Square in Batavia by Carel Lodewijk Dake Jr, shows the white ministry building with palm trees at the front, in a sunny, tropical world. The foreground on the right features four women in colourful sarongs. The painting is signed and dated in the lower right corner. Officials from this ministry presented this painting to C.W. Bodenhausen, Director of Finance in the Dutch East Indies, as a farewell gift on 4 September 1926.
Fun fact
The official dress that Bodenhausen is wearing in the photo is kept at the museum. Despite being a tropical uniform with white trousers, it is made of thick scratchy wool.
The fantasy world of ‘Our Indies’ as depicted in this painting is exactly how the Dutch imagined life in the colony. In reality, Batavia had a rigid class system, racism was legally enshrined and by the 1930s, society was segregated to its core. There was a lot of local resistance, but it did not register in the ‘motherland’. Indonesian freedom fighters were instead portrayed as a band of thieves.
More about the artist
This work was painted by Carel Lodewijk Dake Jr. He was born in Brussels in 1886 and died in Jakarta in 1946. From 1912, he worked in various places in what is now Indonesia.