Philippus Baldaeus and his assistant Gerrit Mosopatam

From 1654 to 1665 Philippus Baldaeus served the Dutch East India Company on Ceylon, today's Sri Lanka, as a minister of the Reformed Church. The Company had pushed the Portuguese off the island's coasts and ruled them as a colony, and he spent much of his time in Jaffna, in the Tamil north, preaching, running schools and trying to bring Hindus and former Catholics into the Dutch church.

This canvas, painted after his return, keeps that world close. Behind the two men lies a landscape with palm trees. The man leaning on the stone pedestal, bare-chested, with earrings and a green parrot beside him, is probably Gerrit Mosopatam, described by the Rijksmuseum as his Sinhalese interpreter. In Point Pedro, on the island's northern tip, a stone in the market square marks the spot where Baldaeus preached under a tamarind tree, a tree a cyclone uprooted in 1963.