Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn’s Java-Album: between romanticism and empiricism

My first impression of Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn’s lithographs of the Javanese volcanoes – selected from his Java-Album and recently exhibited in Lava-Being. Stories from the Center of the Earth at the Graphische Sammlung ETHZ – is their resemblance to something like picturesque postcards of serene landscapes. However, the context in which they were created reveals a more complex and ambivalent story. Published in 1854 alongside written records of his expeditions in the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia, Junghuhn’s images intertwine colonial ambitions of science and romantic European aesthetics.

Junghuhn arrived in Java in 1835 as a military doctor during the government’s bureaucratic transition following the end of the Java War in 1830. The colonial state adopted a company-like organisation to manage the newly-formed Cultivation System, with the aim of intensifying agricultural labour extraction, designed to restore the nation’s wealth and glory (cf. Koekkoek 2019, 116, 145 and 211). Furthermore, the colonial government, who sought for intellectual and religious legitimacy, was actively recruiting educated professionals (cf. Goss 2011, 16 and Koekkoek 2019, 212). During this unstable time, new arrivals – many of whom had no established academic career in Europe – had the opportunity to reinvent themselves as scholars in the Dutch colony. Junghuhn took advantage of this by exploring Java’s volcanoes and measuring the “internal pressure, temperature, and skin conditions” (Goss 2011, 14–19). His extensive scientific explorations were documented in the forms of a travelogue called Topographische und Naturwissenschaftilche Reisen durch Java and a systematic study, Java – seine Gestalt, Pflanzendecke und innere Bauart, both available in the ETHZ catalogue e-rara.

According to Andrew Gross, Junghuhn was an “apostle of enlightenment”, who believed scientific knowledge modernised the colony (cf. Goss 2011, 7). Advocates of the movement sought to quantify and explain the Javanese’s mystical environment using European scientific methods while also shaping colonial culture and generating knowledge about indigenous people and landscapes to facilitate control (cf. Goss 2011, 5 and 14). These colonialist naturalists, relying on European models of taxonomy, combined the taking of local expertise with Western frameworks (cf. Goss 2011, 19) to elaborate “on how Europeans should interact with the Java’s landscape” (Goss 2011, 19).

Approaching Junghuhn’s images, therefore, requires acknowledging both their artistic roots and their instrumental role in the colonial project. Untangling his romantic gaze, the influence of European pictorial and scientific traditions, and the deliberate use of certain figures, clothing, and statues help us unravel the ambivalent character of his work.

My analysis draws upon David Arnold’s theory, explored in The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze. India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856, which demonstrates how European Romanticism has shaped the visual and scientific language of colonial projects abroad. Arnold’s arguments about the “traveller’s gaze” – with its combined sentimental appreciation and its motivation for transformation, viewing landscape as a resource – provides a basis for understanding Junghuhn’s representations.

Perspective and Composition

Blending 19^th-century scientific inquiry with European Romantic aestheticism, Junghuhn’s lithographs typically position the viewer at an elevated distance. This “instructive vista”demonstrates the empirical belief that knowledge is gained through detached observation (Beekman 1996, 138) but also simulates the gaze of the colonial supervisor.Additionally, it visually structures social and “natural” hierarchies where “human, botanical or animal superiority is determined by elevation” (Beekman 1996, 142).

Junghuhn’s compositions are clearly structured with a foreground, middle ground, and background, with transitions from detailed specimens to the abstracted interpretation of the whole.Junghuhn’s wandering gaze (Beekman 1996, 138)moves from the micro to the macro scale: anatomising (cf. Arnold 2014, 92)the volcano’s fissures and geological textures (fig. 1), and echoing the taxonomic logic of classifying, measuring, and controlling nature. Meanwhile, backgrounds have abstracted contours (fig. 3) and are often shown as “untouched” and mystical, contrasting the “cultivated” middle ground, suggesting both the allure of the unknown and the promise of land awaiting colonial intervention. (fig. 2 and 4).

The Traveller’s Gaze

In The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze, India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856, David Arnold argues that Romanticism provided colonialists with a visual language by which ruined landscapes could be transformed into prosperous land. Arnold’s observations can equally be applied to the case of Java. Just as British travellers in India found comfort in landscapes that reminded them of English parks, Junghuhn’s depictions of Java with ordered fields (fig. 2) were pleasing to the European eye. Tamed nature is now flourishing and turned into “renewed flow of revenue from the land”, which they believed was possible thanks to the Dutch occupation (cf. Arnold 2014, 75 and 82).

Junghuhn’s gaze is not merely appreciative; it is fundamentally prospective. Abundance is a general character found in these lithographs, with landscapes full of prosperous natural resources, which mirrors the system for profitability. Nature, if ordered, becomes an asset that the Netherlands can commercially profit and extract revenue from. If untamed, nature in Java is mystical and daunting, provoking a feeling of awe. Overgrown shrubs and trees (fig. 2 and 4), steam coming out of craters (fig. 3), or the steep slope of the volcanoes (fig. 1) are all elements chosen to represent the volcano’s sublime character.

Props

Junghuhn’s use of human figures heightens the sense of the landscape’s scale and sublimity. Small humans are dominated by the volcano’s presence. In figure 1, for instance, an individual is seemingly hanging off the crater in the foreground, and a group of people ascends the peak of the volcano in the background, showing both the steepness and the imposing nature of the terrain.     

Beyond scale, Junghuhn differentiates European and Javanese cultures most visibly through clothing and activity. Europeans are depicted wearing typical 19^th-century European attire – formal and fitted, as seen in figures 2 and 3 – with long-sleeved shirts, long trousers, and wide-brimmed hats. Whilst the indigenous are mostly depicted wearing either a blangkon, a straw hat, or nothing. They are drawn tanned, bare-chested, bare-footed, and wearing traditional sarongs. The distinction is further reinforced by their depicted roles: While the European is surveying the Volcano, the Javanese are engaged in labour. Such visual choices reduce the indigenous population to an object of nature, implying that the “wilderness” needs to be managed by the European “expert”, granting authority to (clothed) Europeans over the (bare) natives. This differentiation was ideologically promoted by other officials, such as Jean-Chrétien Baud, who advocated a racial justification asserting the “white race” had a natural right of domination over “dark-skinned people” (cf. Koekkoek 2019, 212). Furthermore, some works include props such as displaced Hindu-Buddhist statues, which implies colonial appropriation. By relocating these spiritual objects from their original context and incorporating them into the composition, Junghuhn transforms these sacred artifacts into colonial trophies (fig. 4), further asserting dominance over the local environment and culture (cf. Arnold 2014, 76).

Jughuhn’s Java-Album represents the duality between 19^th-century Dutch colonialism: the pursuit of scientific modernisation and the romanticization of the “tropical other”. “Through mixtures of architectural, medical, and botanical languages” (Goss 2011, 19), his works demonstrate that landscape is not a neutral or objective reality, but “a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings” (Arnold 2014, 5). His elevated perspectives, compositional contrasts, and use of props reinforce colonial values and ambitions. Far from objective documentation, Junghuhn’s lithographs reimagine and aestheticize Java through European ideals, contributing to a tradition where “Indonesian science, even that extending back to the colonial period, has become a footnote in the history of science” (Goss 2011, 4).

This essay was written as part of the seminar “Colonial Past, Entangled Present: Natural History Collections in Context” by Monique Ligtenberg and Ella D. Müller at ETH Zurich. The text was proofread by Carmen Bortolin.

Further reading:

Arnold, David: Tropics and the Traveling Gaze. India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856, Seattle: University of Washington Press 2014.

Beekman, E. M.: “Junghuhn’s perception of Javanese nature”, in: Canadian Journal of Netherlandic 17 (1), 1996, S. 135–145.

Goss, Andrew: The Floracrats. State-Sponsored Science and the Failure of the Enlightenment in Indonesia, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press 2011.