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George Lewis and Mooi Indie art
Susie Protschky (2014/ 2025)
George Lewis (1875–1939) began work in 1897 at Atelier Kurkdjian in Surabaya, which he took over as principal photographer after Kurkdjian’s death in 1903.1 Lewis is perhaps best known today for his images of factory work and labourers in Europe as well as the Dutch East Indies.2
However, he also made landscape photographs like this one of tourist sites popular among his well-to-do European clientele. It shows the fishponds of Cipanas at Garut in West Java with the active Mount Guntur in the background.
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European elites in the Dutch East Indies, like their British counterparts in India and Southeast Asia, favoured elevated, cool-climate retreats for holidays and convalescing after illness.3
Garut was one of the more renowned Indies resort destinations. In the early twentieth century, it boasted a bustling town and several luxury hotels the Papandajan, Villa Dolce and Grand Hotel Tjisoeroepan, set within a landscape that suited European tastes in art as well as leisure.
In the 1920s, this image and twenty nine others of Garut by Lewis were reproduced as a series of postcards. One version was endorsed by the cruise-ship company Rotterdamsche Lloyd, which operated between the Netherlands and the Dutch East Indies from 1883 to 1947.4
This particular print is unique among European photographs of Garut for its inclusion of a local woman shown in the foreground. Her presence is emphasised by the photograph’s portrait orientation, another unusual trait in pictures of Garut. |
In combination with the landscape, the woman in her typically Javanese costume of kain (skirt), slendang (shawl) and kebaya (blouse) provides a distinctively Sundanese view of the tropics.
Lewis’s photograph combines aspects of an emerging international style of tourism photography, which created a view of the tropics as an exotic and desirable destination, with elements of a Mooi Indie (Beautiful Indies) scene, mountains, palm trees and shimmering water, that had a long genealogy among European painters of hill stations in colonial Indonesia.5
The trope of the native peasant woman in the tropical landscape is evident again in Lewis’s photograph of two women by a mountain lake at dusk, where the voyeuristic opportunities for the viewer are enhanced by showing the women washing. Indeed, one of the defining features of Western images of the tropics is that native female sensuality was almost always evoked in the landscape rather than in an interior setting.6
Photographs:
#SP 3-01: George Lewis, Mount Guntur from Cipanas, Garut, Java c 1910
#SP 3-02: George Lewis, Lake Leles, sundown, Java c 1910 (also Plate 71)
Footnotes:
- Hedi Hinzler, ‘Onnes Kurkdjian: viewmaker and entrepreneur’, in JL Reed (ed), Toward independence: a century of Indonesia photographed, The Friends of Photography, San Francisco, 1991, p 59.
- See page 57 for Alexander Supartono’s ‘Colonial machine: the image of industry’; also see Lewis’s De Nederlandsch-Indische industrie 1902 at KITLV digital media library, <media-kitlv.nl>; and National Galleries Scotland, viewed 9 July 2013, <nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/L/24154/ artist_name/George%20P.%20Lewis/record_id/22390>.
- Susie Protschky, Images of the tropics: environment and visual culture in colonial Indonesia, KITLV Press, Leiden, 2011, p 52.
- See Lewis’s No 22. Garoet (Java) c 1920, KITLV digital media library, <media‑kitlv.nl>, image no 1402189.
- Krista A Thompson, An eye for the tropics: tourism, photography, and framing the Caribbean picturesque, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2006, pp 103, 107, 108; and Protschky, Images of the tropics, 2011, p 91.
- Protschky, ‘Seductive landscapes: gender and European representations of nature in the Dutch East Indies in the late colonial period’, Gender & History, vol 20, no 2, 2008, pp 372–98.
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