Raden Saleh Sjarif Boestaman (1811-1880) was an Indonesian Romantic painter of Javanese ethnicity who pioneered modern Indonesian art. He was considered to be Indonesia’s first modern artist, and his paintings, albeit many are associated with the nineteenth-century romanticism that was popular in Europe at the time, also expressed his cultural roots and national history.
As a teenager Raden Saleh first learned from the Belgian artist A.J. Payen in West Java. His big talent brought him to the Netherlands to further study art in 1829. He studied under the guidance of Cornelius Kruseman and Andries Schelfhout.
It was from Kruseman that Raden Saleh studied portraiture, and later he was accepted at various European courts where he was assigned to paint portraits. From Schelfhout, Raden Saleh shaped his skills as a landscape painter. During his visits in several countries, Raden Saleh encountered a lion tamer, and from that his most famous painting of animal fights was created, which has brought fame to him. Many of his paintings were exhibited at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
Raden Saleh was an important artist for Indonesia, not just for the beauty of his paintings but for his role in bringing the world’s attention to the struggle the people of the Dutch Indies experienced during that time. When he returned back to Indonesia from the Netherlands, he painted “The Arrest of Pangeran Diponegoro” which told of how the colonial government betrayed the rebel leader Prince Diponegoro, thus ending Java War in 1930. A different interpretation and expression of this arrest of Pangeran Diponegoro was painted by the Tugu owner, a massive painting that possessed him one day, titled “The Fall Of Java.” This painting occupied the whole expansive wall of the Prince Diponegoro Room in Tugu Kunstkring Paleis in Jakarta, now a silent loving memory to the great sacrifice he did for Indonesia.
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