Culitivated Tastes argues for a new evaluation of colonial landscape art and representations of nature from the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia). The thesis focuses on examples from Java, Sumatra, Ambon and Bali during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also discusses early post-colonial literature. It uses paintings and photography, with supporting references to Dutch colonial novels, to argue that images of landscape and nature were linked to the formation of Dutch colonial identities and, more generally, to the politics of colonial expansion. Paintings were not simply colonial kitsch (mooi Indi??, or 'beautiful Indies', images): they were the purest expression of Dutch ideals about the peaceful, prosperous landscapes that were crucial to uncontested colonial rule. Often these ideals were contradicted by historical reality. Indeed, paintings rarely showed Dutch interventions in Indies landscapes, particularly those that were met with resistance and rebellion. Colonial photographs often supported the painterly ideals of peace and prosperity, but in different ways: photographs celebrated European intrusions upon and restructuring of Indonesian landscapes, communicating the notions of progress and rational, benevolent rule. It is in literature that we find broader discussions of nature, which includes climate as well as topography. Here representations of landscape and nature are explicitly linked to the formation of colonial identities. Dutch anxieties about the boundaries of racial and gender identities were embedded within references to Indies landscape and nature. Inner colonial worlds intersected with perceptions of the larger environment in literature: here the ideals and triumphs associated with Dutch colonial expansion were juxtaposed against fears related to remaining European in a tropical Asian landscape.

Culitivated Tastes argues for a new evaluation of colonial landscape art and representations of nature from the Netherlands Indies (colonial Indonesia). The thesis focuses on examples from Java, Sumatra, Ambon and Bali during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but also discusses early post-colonial literature. It uses paintings and photography, with supporting references to Dutch colonial novels, to argue that images of landscape and nature were linked to the formation of Dutch colonial identities and, more generally, to the politics of colonial expansion. Paintings were not simply colonial kitsch (mooi Indi??, or 'beautiful Indies', images): they were the purest expression of Dutch ideals about the peaceful, prosperous landscapes that were crucial to uncontested colonial rule. Often these ideals were contradicted by historical reality. Indeed, paintings rarely showed Dutch interventions in Indies landscapes, particularly those that were met with resistance and rebellion. Colonial photographs often supported the painterly ideals of peace and prosperity, but in different ways: photographs celebrated European intrusions upon and restructuring of Indonesian landscapes, communicating the notions of progress and rational, benevolent rule. It is in literature that we find broader discussions of nature, which includes climate as well as topography. Here representations of landscape and nature are explicitly linked to the formation of colonial identities. Dutch anxieties about the boundaries of racial and gender identities were embedded within references to Indies landscape and nature. Inner colonial worlds intersected with perceptions of the larger environment in literature: here the ideals and triumphs associated with Dutch colonial expansion were juxtaposed against fears related to remaining European in a tropical Asian landscape.