I went recently to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the guardian of Dutch culture and a central repository of European art. Entire floors and wings...
I went recently to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, the guardian of Dutch culture and a central repository of European art. Entire floors and wings were replete with Greco-Roman statues, Renaissance landscapes and Flemish still-lives. Amidst all this, I decoded a history that was recognisable, but not wholly my own.
It was early summer and I was with my children. We entered a gallery and my son faced an oil painting. I glanced blankly at a familiar 17th-century scene: people of wealth, with powdered wigs and lace sleeves, feasting on delicacies. My boy, Roshan, with black hair and eyes, lingered. So I looked closer and saw, startlingly, another brown boy, with black hair and eyes, in the painting.
That boy was Filander van Bengalen. In breeches and grey livery, he holds a tray obligingly. Filander is said, in the exhibition catalogue, to be 10-year-old, like my son. They are in Dokkum, close to the North Sea, in this painting from 1697. How did Filander come to serve in this remote place? And what does his journey tell us about our contemporary parsing of difference?
Slavery in Netherlands
The context for the painting was this year’s Rijkmuseum exhibition: “slavery”. Taking children there is perhaps a parent’s perverse idea of the kid-friendly....
