Pieter Cnoll, Cornelia van Nijenrode, their Daughters and Two Enslaved Servants

Cornelia van Nijenrode, in black beside her husband, was born around 1630 in Hirado, Japan, the daughter of the head of the Dutch trading post there and a Japanese mother. In 1652 she married Pieter Cnoll, a senior merchant of the Dutch East India Company in Batavia. In 1665 Jacob Coeman painted them on a terrace above the sea with their daughters Catharina and Hester. Behind the couple stand two people the family held in slavery. The woman with the basket of fruit was not named. The young man is most probably Surapati, who later escaped and became a ruler in East Java. After Cnoll died in 1672, Cornelia traded on her own account and grew very rich. Her second husband, a Batavia judge named Johan Bitter, fought her for years in the courts over who controlled that fortune.