View of Batavia

Andries Beeckman painted this view for the men who ran the Dutch East India Company. In 1662 he sold it, with one other picture, to the company's Amsterdam chamber, and it was hung in the room where the directors met. The writer Olfert Dapper, describing Amsterdam in 1663, found it there among Chinese and Japanese paintings, the great city of Batavia with its fearsome and invincible castle. A drawing by Simon Fokke shows it still above the fireplace of that room in 1768, when Stadtholder William V took the chair as senior director. What the directors looked at was their Asian headquarters, today's Jakarta. The low walls and bastions of the castle stretch across the middle distance, and in front of them a crowd gathers under tall palms. Beeckman signed his name on an upturned boat in the lower right corner.