In his address to the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences delivered on 10 September 1815, Thomas Stamford Raffles, the Lieutenant-Governor of the British interregnum government on Java, touched on military surveyor Captain Godfrey Baker's impressions of the monumental architectural remains located near the village of Prambanan. “In attempting to describe the Chandi Sewo [Candi Sewu], or Thousand Temples, which form a principal part of these ruins”, Raffles told the gathering:

Raffles evidently agreed, for he included two vignettes and two aquatinted plates of ruins in the Candi Sewu complex in his landmark publication The History of Java (1817).

Baker's evocative response to the ruined candi is typical of the way in which ruins were enjoyed and understood in Britain. Ruins had long held appeal for aesthetic reflection and representation in Western art, and by the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Europeans were first starting to take an interest in the South-East Asian remains, the “pleasure of ruins” had become something of a mania. The crumbling remains of past civilizations became steeped in allusions that were discernible to those who considered themselves to possess a heightened sensibility and an educated taste. “Educated” meant a knowledge of the classics,Footnote ² and an education was not considered complete without undertaking a Grand Tour of the Continent where vestiges of the classical past could be thoroughly explored and enjoyed, as James Boswell found during his own travels in Italy. Writing to Rousseau in 1765 Boswell professed to a modicum of self-improvement as a result of his experiences:

It is estimated that by 1785 some 40,000 Englishmen were travelling on the Continent,Footnote ⁴ but while it was classical Greece and Rome that most completely captured the imaginations of eighteenth-century connoisseurs of the ruin, the remains of the past could also be found elsewhere. Scattered across the British Isles were decaying castles and keeps and the many ruined abbeys and monasteries forcefully abandoned during the Dissolution. These provided ample opportunity for ruin appreciation closer to home, particularly during the Napoleonic blockades when travel to Europe was severely curtailed. For the adventurous few there were journeys further afield as Britain's expanding trading empire brought the remains of the pagodas, monuments and temples of South, East and South-East Asia into the lexicon of ruin appreciation.

It was not only the increased opportunities for travel that contributed to the eighteenth-century dilettante's appreciation for the past. The period also saw the beginnings of the development of a systematized approach to the observation, recording, retrieval and classification of historical remains that marked the emergence of archaeology as a new discipline out of the less ordered practices of the antiquary.Footnote ⁵ Archaeological practices challenged the traditional primacy of the text in the interpretation of the past. Objects were no longer analysed based purely on iconological meanings derived from ancient literary sources. Instead, by subjecting them to a detailed and thorough examination with particular emphasis on the accurate recording, in both image and text, of their forms, dimensions and extent, architectural remains and artefacts were used to establish chronologies and shed new light on ancient cultures. The greater prominence being accorded to the object increased the importance of the role played by images in antiquarian publications. Plates showing carefully drawn monuments and antiquities in their current ruined condition, as well as technical drawings of what was assumed to be their complete state, became the established modus operandi of the antiquary.Footnote ⁶

Such an approach had obvious advantages in the South-East Asian context. As local texts were considered by the British to have a highly dubious historiographical value and the local peoples were perceived as indifferent to or ill-informed about their own pasts, the region's objects and monuments came to be viewed as the only authentic repositories of its “true” and “lost” histories.Footnote ⁷ The plates and vignettes of South-East Asia's ruins included in publications of the period, however, did more than just meet a demand for the detailed representation of ruined and conjecturally restored monuments or for illustrations of the antiquities and epigraphical materials found nearby. At this formative stage in the development of archaeological practices, they also conformed with the pictorial rules that governed the aesthetic tastes of the day, most notably for the sublime and the picturesque.

According to its eighteenth-century disciples, those objects or images imbued with the sublime had the power to inspire awe and wonderment and transport the beholder to a heightened emotional experience. Within its vocabulary of stock motifs, ruins were judged to possess just such a power:

The sheer scale and number of the South-East Asian candis, their silent, gloomy interiors, their air of abandonment, and the sense of mystery that surrounded their origins, meanings and purposes, stirred emotions that were perfectly in accord with the feelings of terror, darkness, solitude, vastness, unfamiliarity, power and magnificence that were the sublime's distinguishing attributes.

In recording their experiences some of the visitors to the Javanese candis and monuments drew on the typical parlance of the sublime. Java's ruined candis struck Raffles with “astonishment and veneration”,Footnote ⁹ and Colonel Colin Mackenzie chronicled, with an air of agreeable horror, of his visit to Candi Sewu:

There are clear coincidences of sentiment here with William Marshall's description of the emotions aroused by the sublime in his 1795 review of the poem The Landscape:

Both Raffles and Mackenzie shared with Marshall not only the ability to recognize an encounter with the sublime, but also an acquaintance with the appropriate emotional responses to make, and a knowledge of the fitting terminology with which to describe the moment. Astonishment was the sublime emotion nonpareil. It was “the effect of the sublime in its highest degree” as Edmund Burke tells us in his influential and much-quoted essay, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1795).Footnote ¹²

The elitism implicit in the need for an educated eye and a “mind possessing the least sensibility” as prerequisites to a true appreciation of a ruin landscape was equally present in the picturesque. For its proponents, a landscape was much improved, indeed made picturesque, by its poetic, painterly and classical associations with which the onlooker was expected to have some familiarity. When, early in the eighteenth century, Addison had written that “the Works of Nature [are] still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of Art”,Footnote ¹³ he had neatly encapsulated the basic premise of the picturesque, one that required the landscape to bear a resemblance to a painted image. Viewed with the eye of an artist and by the “rules of painting”,Footnote ¹⁴ those prospects deemed worthy of admiration were the ones most closely corresponding with the compositional values of a painted landscape: a tripartite arrangement with side-screens, carefully lit to draw the viewer within. By the end of the century, however, the roles of art and nature had reversed to a degree, with nature becoming the guide to art. A picturesque image was one that most resembled nature, or nature as it should be. “Nature”, declared that indefatigable champion of the picturesque, the Rev. William Gilpin, “is the archetype”.Footnote ¹⁵

Nature, it was admitted, did require some gentle assistance, and the views captured by artists of the picturesque were carefully manipulated to improve on the original. According to Gilpin, images could:

What was required for a landscape or its representation to be considered perfectly picturesque was that it exhibit some irregularity, variety, ruggedness and roughness that lent a certain visual interest. And what could be considered more irregular, varied, rugged and rough than a ruined building?

As a complementary adornment to the landscape, the ruin became the pre-eminent leitmotif of the picturesque. “Ruins”, declared Claire Clairmont, step-sister of Mary Shelley and lover of Lord Byron, “have a fine effect and henceforth I shall hardly think any scenery complete without them”.Footnote ¹⁷ Gilpin was in full agreement with Clairmont's sensibility, for the imagination, he suggested, is “more taken with prospects of the ruinous kind than with most smiling Views of Plenty and Prosperity in their greatest perfection”,Footnote ¹⁸ and elsewhere:

Those visitors to South-East Asia who, like Gilpin, possessed an inquisitive, picturesque eye, found plenty of “elegant relics” to amuse them. Throughout the region, scores of ruined temples, pagodas and monuments were “submitting”, as Baker observed, “with sullen slowness, to the destructive hand of time and nature”.Footnote ²⁰

Baker's allusion to the “destructive hand of time and nature” highlights an important element of ruin appreciation. Much of the perennial appeal of ruins is their capacity to act as salient reminders of the inevitability of the passing of all things, that even the most spectacular and grandiose of human achievements are eventually doomed to decay. What the images of ruin conjured up for their eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century picturesque admirers was an agreeably melancholic reflection on the ephemerality of the works, deeds and lives of humankind.

Melancholy, the “English malady”, had become something of a fashionable intellectual indulgence during the eighteenth century.Footnote ²¹ Operating as a memento mori, the ruin exactly suited the elegiac tone of the times, encapsulating responses to the futility, transience and smallness of human accomplishment and, at its most basic and foreboding, to our own mortality as Diderot famously demonstrated in a passage of his Salon (1767).

In order for the contemplation of ruins to be a pleasurable experience, however, it was important that some distance, either chronological, geographical or both, be placed between them and the viewer. The circumstances surrounding the act of ruination could not be too precisely remembered: pleasing decay required the slow hand of time. The melancholic pleasure that characterized ruin sentiment derived from contemplation of the erasure of a monument's significance and the passing of those responsible for its construction, not from a remembrance of the act of its destruction.Footnote ²³ Ruins could be too new and too familiar, particularly when they were associated with events that had resulted in countless personal tragedies and profoundly unsettling changes with which whole communities were still coming to terms. And Europe at this time abounded with such scenes of newly wrought destruction.

In the late eighteenth century, revolutionary France had created such an abundance of ruined buildings that Baron von Grimm, editor of Diderot's Salons, wrote with pained irony in a 1791 letter to Catherine the Great:

For the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century onlookers from just across the Channel, such ruins could provide little aesthetic pleasure, raising as they did the spectre of a frighteningly recent social and political rupture that had occurred so distressingly close to home – especially at a time when Britain itself was experiencing profound and unsettling changes to its political, economic and social structures, and to the very shape of its landscape, thanks to industrialization.

In his essay “Why distant objects please”, published in 1822 in volume two of Table-Talk, William Hazlitt described distance in broad terms, ascribing pleasure to the contemplation of temporal as well as spatial distance, which, he suggested, had “much the same effect”.Footnote ²⁵ If we widen Hazlitt's understanding of the appeal of physical remoteness to include not only far off objects within a British country scene but also those within the sweeping reach of its expanding empire, we can understand the attraction of representations of South-East Asia's ruined past. Trade and exploration had brought the artistic and architectural achievements of distant peoples to the attention of the British public, and the depiction of the monumental remains of remote cultures expanded ruin contemplation from a rumination on the distance of time to include the distance of place. The chronological, cultural and geographical dislocation of contemporary Europe from Prambanan, Borobudur and the candis of the Dieng Plateau not only dispelled the associations of violence and bloodshed that permeated scenes of recent ruination, but also insulated the British viewer from the trauma of recent experiences on the other side of the Channel. Separated from the viewer by both time and space, the views of Java's candis, like Hazlitt's distant objects, could please because “not being obtruded too close upon the eye, we clothe them with the indistinct and airy colours of fancy”.Footnote ²⁶

The pleasing sense of removal or displacement that distance in time and place lent to the contemplation of ruins was further enhanced when their physical destruction could be attributed to something other than human action. Nothing more successfully or more picturesquely invoked thoughts on the transitory quality of human achievement than the sight of ruins overgrown with a luxuriant blanket of mosses, lichens, ferns and vines. A thick shroud of vegetation not only added a tonal interest and variety that enhanced a ruin's formal picturesque qualities, but also prompted meditations on the all-consuming power of nature and the insignificance of humankind in the greater scheme of things. “No circumstance so forcibly marks the desolation of a spot once inhabited” suggested Thomas Whately in his widely read Observations on Modern Gardening (1770), “as the prevalence of nature over it”,Footnote ²⁷ a theme taken up to great effect by Byron in the fourth canto of his hugely popular verse Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. A Romaunt (1812–18):

While we know he is recalling scenes of ruination close to the shores of the Mediterranean, Byron's lines, substituting the tropical banyan for the cypress and ivy of cooler climes, could just as easily refer to the candis illustrated in The History of Java which, Baker reported, were swathed in “a profusion of trees and herbage of all descriptions”.Footnote ²⁹

So important was the presence of vegetation to the aesthetics of ruin appreciation that, from a formal, picturesque point of view, ruins came to be viewed as natural rather than synthetic motifs. In Gilpin's response to Fountains Abbey we find the balance shifting towards viewing the ruin as an element of the landscape rather than of architecture:

In order for the ruin to function as a memento mori, however, the balance between architecture and landscape could not shift too far. It is their ambiguity in belonging to both the human and natural worlds which gives ruins their affecting poignancy.Footnote ³¹ A building could not be too ruined or the delicate balance between architecture and nature would collapse. There is a difference between ruin and rubble: ruination is not obliteration.

Herein lies the double paradox of the ruin and ruin imagery. Broken and incomplete, ruins rarely conform to their original forms or designs and are as often as not incapable of fulfilling the functions for which they were constructed, yet their aesthetic value lies in this incompleteness.Footnote ³² At the same time, while the original building or monument must be vastly transformed in order to provide visual entertainment in its new guise as a ruin, its ruination cannot be too complete. Ruins may indeed be valued for their decomposition as providing evidence of the unavoidable effects of time, but it is their endurance and resistance to absolute annihilation that allows them to be enjoyed as ruins. Once their destruction is complete, the spell is broken: the chimera of the ruin collapses into no more than a disordered mass of brick and stone.

This was an important consideration in the depiction of the South-East Asian ruins. “[S]o much encumbered with stones, weeds, and bushes”,Footnote ³³ the candis were frequently difficult to distinguish through the luxuriant blankets of tropical vegetation and debris they had accumulated over the centuries. Whereas the foliage which adorned Britain's own ruined castles, keeps and monasteries or garlanded the marble colonnades of classical Greece and Rome was thought to enhance the remains by intoning a gentle lament on ephemerality, in the South-East Asian context nature was frequently perceived as dangerous and voracious, its acts of destruction malignant, not benign.

Quoted in British publications of the period, the French naturalist J. B. L. C. Th. Leschenault de la Tour, who had travelled extensively through Java in 1803–06, upheld contemporary theories regarding the extreme potency that tropical plants derived from their torrid climate. In the equatorial regions, he noted,

The scale and vigour of plant life in South-East Asia's jungles astounded the British. “There is nothing more striking in the Malayan forests”, Raffles observed,

Little wonder, then, that Java's candis had been so thoroughly overwhelmed.

In his description of the remains at Prambanan, Mackenzie expressed both dread and admiration for the triumphal and destructive power of Java's plant life. A tree growing through the ruin, he suggested, acted with a sly and malicious intent:

There is an edge, a cruelty, to nature's reclamation of the South-East Asian ruins. Rather than being decoratively “[d]ress'd with the rampant ivy's uncheck'd growth”,Footnote ³⁷ the perception of many British visitors was that South-East Asia's ruins were neglected and forest-drowned.

This did not mean that South-East Asian vegetation could not be depicted to pleasing effect. The lushly verdant power of the jungle could lend an irresistibly sublime aspect to the ruins – it was just a matter of careful editing. As Gilpin advised in his essay The Art of Sketching Landscape with regard to British views, South-East Asia's natural landscape could easily be “improved” in its representation.

Nature, he wrote in another of his instructive publications, should not be copied with “painful exactness”:

Changes in the interest of making a good picture could sometimes be taken too far by an over-zealous artist, as Raffles' friend Thomas Murdoch found when commissioning images for his own publication on Madeira. The drawings, Murdoch discovered,

Not all artists were quite so improvident in their transformation of distant landscapes. With some careful manipulation – a little judicious tree felling here, some replanting there – professional artists were able to depict South-East Asia's ruined past in a highly acceptable style, as the reviewer of The History of Java in The Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and Its Dependencies found. “[W]e have rarely seen exceeded”, they suggested, “the exquisite combination of foliage and architectural decay, exhibited in the representations of the temples at Brambanan”.Footnote ⁴¹

Such praise owed as much to the skills of the artists responsible for the publication's plates and vignettes as it did to the work of nature. When The History of Java was released it had become standard practice for the drawings of amateur draftspeople to be handed over to professional artists to be reinterpreted for publication in a style that suited the aesthetic tastes of the time.Footnote ⁴² Raffles' administration had not included the services of a professional artist, for the official draftsman who had accompanied the British invasion force in 1811 had returned to India with Lord Minto's party.Footnote ⁴³ While a number of the images made by members of the British military and Dutch civilian engineers exhibit a passing acquaintance with the niceties of the picturesque, they were, on the whole, created as technical drawings with no great claims to artistic merit.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was only with their reworking by professional artists and engravers back in Britain that sometimes fairly perfunctory drawings became full-blown examples of the picturesque style.

Such a transformation can be detected in the vignette of Candi Lara Jonggrang by the engraver James Mitan included in The History of Java (Figure 1). While it might be, as Baker had discovered when surveying the remains, “difficult to obtain a correct plan or description of their original disposition, extent, or even of their number and figure”Footnote ⁴⁵ from Mitan's engraving, the composition as a whole conforms with the picturesque mode of ruin landscape depiction. The drawing by Baker, which was the study for the vignette, exhibits little of the detail, irregularity and tonal variation demanded by the picturesque, showing only a rough tumble of stories and a loosely indicated thick carpet of vegetation largely undifferentiated into individual plants or foliage (Figure 2). In the finished engraving, however, the rules of picturesque composition are in full attendance. Individual plants displaying a variety of leaf forms are discernible in the low, shaded edges. The darkened foreground gives way to a clear and well-lit space winding through the middle ground, drawing the viewer towards the ruin which is elevated according to picturesque convention. Conveniently, Baker found that the most visible and complete part of the otherwise decimated structure at Lara Jonggrang was not at ground level but emerging from the rubble and debris of its tumbled masonry, giving the impression of a miniature martello standing atop a small hillock. The low viewpoint and angle from which he chose to depict the candi, ensuring its prominence within the composition, was further accentuated by Mitan by his throwing sunlight, the brightest point in the vignette, upon the ruin wall. By adopting the conventions of the picturesque Mitan transformed a very simple sketch into a ruin landscape, ensuring that audiences would be sympathetically receptive to Baker's reflection that “[n]othing can exceed the air of melancholy, desolation and ruin” that the locale inspired.Footnote ⁴⁶

Figure 1. James Mitan, Northeast View of the Principal Temple at Jongrángan 1815 (vignette from Thomas Stamford Raffles' The History of Java, London: 1817, vol. 2, 11), line engraving

Figure 2. Captain Godfrey P. Baker, Northeast View of the Principal Temple at Jongrangan, Including the Northern Entrance, Adjacent Temple etc (from an album of 58 drawings: No. 10 Original Drawings for the Engravings in The History of Java vol. 2: 55 Sketches and Plans of Subjects in Java, Several Published in 1817, of which 15 are by me, G. P. Baker, taking out the 5 of Plaoosan for vol. 1) c. 1814, pen and ink and pencil. © The Trustees of the British Museum (1939.3–11.05, 4)

A similar pictorial manipulation can be detected in John Walker's vignette One of the Gateways at Majapahit, based on drawings by the Dutch engineer Wardenaar (Figures 3 and 4). Here the artist has made changes to ensure that the delicate balance between ruin and nature has been maintained. In the original drawing, the cramped and enclosed framing of the image gives the impression that the ruins stood within dense and oppressive vegetation, yet in the vignette there is plenty of light and space. The jungle, which Walker obviously considered had, as Gilpin suggested, “pushed itself too much in sight”, has been forced back some distance behind the ruin and pruned into a pleasingly shaped backdrop that throws the gateway into relief and echoes its form: the voraciousness of the South-East Asian jungle has been tamed into English parkland prettiness.

Figure 3. John Walker, One of the Gateways at Majapahit (vignette from Thomas Stamford Raffles' The History of Java, London: 1817, vol. 2, 54), line engraving

Figure 4. J. W. B. Wardenaar, (Ruin of a Small Temple at Majapahit Covered by Jungle (Java)) (from an album of 58 drawings: No. 10 Original Drawings for the Engravings in The History of Java vol. 2: 55 Sketches and Plans of Subjects in Java, Several Published in 1817, of which 15 are by me, G. P. Baker, taking out the 5 of Plaoosan for vol. 1) c. 1814, watercolour. © The Trustees of the British Museum (1939.3–11.05, 29)

But while scenes of ruination could be manipulated according to aesthetic necessity to reclaim the candis from the encroaching jungle, artists could not make too obvious or too forced a restoration or the ruin would cease to be picturesquely pleasing. As Gilpin remarked of John Aisalbie's restoration of Fountains Abbey which had seen the ruined building cleared of its foliage, the surrounding land mowed, and parts of the building reconstructed,

The speculative reconstructions of the candis included in The History of Java avoided such unpicturesque faux pas. Presented as unpoetically as possible in the form of technical drawings, the contrast could not be more striking between these and the romantic aquatints produced by William Daniell that depict the ruined candis surmounted by masses of luxuriant vegetation against dramatically clouded skies, craggy mountain ranges and smoking volcanoes (see, for example, Figures 5 and 6). Daniell enjoyed a reputation as one of Britain's foremost artists specializing in the Oriental view and his “superlatively beautiful” ruin landscapes, at least to one reviewer, rendered the candis infinitely more pleasing to the eye:

Figure 5. The Large Temple at Brambánan Restored (plate from Thomas Stamford Raffles' The History of Java, London: 1817, vol. 2, between pp. 18 and 19), etching

Figure 6. William Daniell after H. C. Cornelius, The Large Temple at Brambánan (plate from Thomas Stamford Raffles' The History of Java, London: 1817, vol. 2, between pp. 18 and 19), aquatint and etching

Vegetation was not only cleared from sites of interest, it could also be added to images to promote their decorative appeal. One of the most obvious displays of an artistic green thumb amongst The History of Java vignettes is Mitan's image of Candi Jabung, a brick structure completed during the Majapahit era (Figure 7). In the vignette, the candi is given a decoratively verdant setting embellished with elegantly sinuous saplings, delicate fern fronds, and broad-leafed palms silhouetted against a clouded sky. A drawing of Candi Jabung by the physician and amateur naturalist Dr Thomas Horsfield, however, sited the monument on a small hill surrounded by open plains (Figure 8). Another, by a member of Mackenzie's survey party, shows it standing by fields under cultivation (a buffalo drawing a plough can be seen in the mid-ground just to the right of the candi), while a drawing by Baker now in the British Museum and purported to be the study for the vignette does not include any elements of landscape at all (Figures 9 and 10).Footnote ⁴⁹ Mitan's picturesquely leafy setting, it would appear, was entirely fanciful.

Figure 7. James Mitan, Western Front of the Larger Temple at Jabang near Probolingo 1815 (vignette from Thomas Stamford Raffles' The History of Java, London: 1817, vol. 2, p. 51), line engraving

Figure 8. Thomas Horsfield, (Candi Jabung, East Java) (from an album of 62 drawings (60 folios)) c. 1800–18, pencil, © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Horsfield Collection WD956, f.21)

Figure 9. Member of Mackenzie's party, (South Face of the Temple at Jabung, East Java. A European Officer Making Notes at a Table) (from an unbound portfolio of 66 drawings) 1812, pencil and watercolour. © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (Mackenzie Collection WD913, Portfolio no. 7)

Figure 10. Captain Godfrey P. Baker, Western Front of the Temple at Jabong (from an album of 58 drawings: No. 10 Original Drawings for the Engravings in The History of Java vol. 2: 55 Sketches and Plans of Subjects in Java, Several Published in 1817, of which 15 are by me, G. P. Baker, taking out the 5 of Plaoosan for vol. 1) c. 1814, pen and ink and wash. © The Trustees of the British Museum (1939.3–11.05, 34)

Similarly, the evocative and mysterious mood which Mitan created through a dynamic use of light and dark and his placement of the candi partially emerging from shadow was the product of his imagination. Baker and other draftsmen working in Java had depicted Candi Jabung in a very matter-of-fact manner, its form clearly defined by broad daylight and exhibiting no hint of theatricality. Mitan, on the other hand, infused his image with all the drama of the sublime: “Almost all the heathen temples were dark”, Burke advised in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.

Gilpin also advocated the use of shade, darkness or gloom for picturesque effect:

While these changes were clearly intended to add picturesque interest to the image, Mitan made other alterations to Candi Jabung which were obviously based on erroneous assumptions about the candi’s architectural form. Produced as part of a process in which artists were working with sometimes indifferent drawings of places and objects they had never seen, and in a creative climate in which they were encouraged to make such changes as they felt would be more palatable to British tastes, errors of interpretation were inevitable. As Marryat was to observe some years after The History of Java was published, the absence of professional artists from official voyages allowed all manner of inaccuracies to be incorporated into images which purported to provide a faithful view of far off places.

The error in Mitan's vignette lies with his depiction of its roof line. Originally, Candi Jabung's unusual roof line represented a variation on a standard East Javanese four-sided stepped and tapered roof type of the kind depicted in another of the vignettes, The Smaller Temple at Jabung near Probolingo.Footnote ⁵³ At Candi Jabung, elements of this stepped roof type (vestiges of which can be seen in Horsfield's drawing), were incorporated into the rounded form of a stupa.Footnote ⁵⁴ Drawings executed in Java by Horsfield and by members of Mackenzie's survey party show that this upper section of the candi had collapsed into a grass-covered mound, but none of these images necessarily suggest that it had formerly been topped by a simple, unadorned dome as devised by Mitan for his depiction of a more structurally complete building. The images by Baker on which Mitan based his engravings, however, show not only the rounded mass of vegetation, but also what appears to be the remains of a ribbed or tessellated structure which could readily be misinterpreted as a simple brick cupola like that depicted by Mitan. Indeed, Baker may have created his drawings under just such a misapprehension.

Mitan's interpretation of the candi’s roof line may also have been influenced by an engraving reproduced in Sir John Chardin's widely read account of his travels, The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies, which had been published towards the end of the seventeenth century but which still attracted a wide readership.Footnote ⁵⁵ Mitan's image of Candi Jabung and An Ancient Tower at Irivan (Figure 11)Footnote ⁵⁶ appear to share a passing similarity. Given that Baker's report reproduced in Raffles’ text makes reference to “Syrian” roof styles when describing Candi Sewu,Footnote ⁵⁷ and Raffles himself hints at the influence of Egypt with regard to Candi SukuhFootnote ⁵⁸ (a candi which was also attributed to the Carthaginians),Footnote ⁵⁹ it is not inconceivable that Mitan turned to models in the Near East for clarification of architectural details where the Javanese sketches proved confusing or incomprehensible.

Figure 11. An Ancient Tower at Irivan (from John Chardin's The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East Indies, London: Moses Pitt, 1686, vol. 1, opp. 246), engraving

Misunderstandings such as these are entirely understandable when we compare the various drawings of Candi Jabung made in Java. While the artists had enjoyed the benefit of actually seeing the candi, the images they produced differ dramatically in the quality and style of the draftsmanship. There appears to be little agreement in their conception of the candi’s dimensions (compare, for example, the relative size of the personnel in Figures 8 and 9) even though its proportions were recorded as part of Mackenzie's official survey as can be ascertained from those drawings which include Europeans and Javanese in the act of measuring the ruin, and a drawing now in the collection of the British Library which is annotated with measurements.Footnote ⁶⁰

Mitan's vignette, while it does portray the proportions of the candi with some accuracy, makes no reference to the presence of the survey party which had recorded, in written reports and drawings, the candi’s dimensions, building materials and current state of repair. Indeed, none of the plates or vignettes in The History of Java allude to the British or Dutch surveys, despite the fact that all the ruins discussed in the chapter on antiquities were subjected to this type of scrutiny in order to compile the reports which formed the basis of Raffles’ text. On the contrary, there are instances in which European and Javanese interaction with the ruins, as recorded in the survey drawings on which The History of Java plates were based, was purposely removed for publication.

The presence of figures in a picturesque landscape was somewhat problematic, for the picturesque's emphasis on the rugged and the rough extended not only to the landscape but also to its staffage. Just as picturesque objects and motifs were rarely functional and the landscapes in which they stood were seldom shaped for utility, ruin landscapes tended to be peopled with the idle, the itinerant, and the mendicant. Improvement and industry were anathema to the picturesque taste. For nature to be the archetype as Gilpin demanded, obvious human intervention in the landscape had to be kept to a minimum, and those motifs deemed most picturesque were often ones which would have been unpleasant or unacceptable in real life. In the picturesque utopia, neat and comfortable residences gave way to crumbling ruins and rustic hovels, tilled and productive lands to rugged wildernesses, industrious agricultural labourers to lazing peasants or bold banditti.

Of course the appalling conditions of Britain's rural poor who had to live in those rustic hovels, and the changing social and economic conditions that resulted from enclosure and the increasing mechanization of agricultural production, which not only led to mass unemployment but also fundamentally altered the landscape so that examples of “untouched” nature were becoming increasingly rare, were all highly problematic. To the advocates of the picturesque, however, representations of rusticity and decay did not invite such unsavoury allusions. “Moral, and picturesque ideas do not always coincide”, Gilpin observed in one of his travel publications in a passage that has become somewhat notorious:

These sentiments appear to have extended to Daniell's vision of the South-East Asian ruin landscape, for the drawing by the Dutch surveyor H. C. Cornelius on which his plate The Large Temple at Brambánan [Prambanan] is based, is a perfect hive of activity. In Cornelius' image (Figure 12), top-hatted Europeans are hard at work measuring and recording the candi and directing a small army of Javanese workers who are engaged in the more menial tasks of clearing it of vegetation and rubble. Such scenes of industry do not appear to have interested Daniell, however. His image retains just the three seated Javanese spectators in the right foreground – the only figures in Cornelius' drawing not actively engaged in the survey. To these Daniell has added four more Javanese figures, all of whom show little interaction with the remains, a pictorial device he also employed in his views of One of the Temples on the Mountain Dieng or Prahu and One of the Smaller Temples at Brambanan in Its Present State.Footnote ⁶² Their inclusion seems in accordance with Gilpin's call for figures to be “at best only picturesque appendages” to the landscape. “They are of a negative nature, neither adding to the grandeur of the idea, nor taking from it. They merely and simply adorn a scene”.Footnote ⁶³

Figure 12. H. C. Cornelius, View of the Ruins of a Bramin Temple at Brambanang as Form'd in the Jaar 1807 1807, pen and ink, wash, sepia and green wash. © The Trustees of the British Museum (Raffles Collection 1939.3–11.06, 30)

It is not only their languorous attitudes that cause the figures to enhance the picturesque appeal of the plates. The clothing styles of the Javanese, so different from European fashions, and their bearing of kris, which marked them not only as romantically exotic but lent the scenes an exciting undercurrent of danger and barbarism, ensured that the figures conformed with Gilpin's opinions on the personnel that were best suited for inclusion in a picturesque landscape:

The kris, in particular, captured British imaginations. It was often represented by British commentators more as an instrument of murder than of warfare, one “characteristic of men more inclined to attack their enemy than defend themselves”.Footnote ⁶⁵ For British readers whose imaginations were attuned to the more exciting fictions of the picturesque, Raffles' suggestion that “[q]uiet and peaceable as the Javans now are, were they once roused to insurrection, their blood would rapidly boil, and they would no doubt be guilty of many excesses” must have made a deep impression.Footnote ⁶⁶ Here, it seemed, could be found all the wildness and ferocity that Gilpin demanded.

Survey workers were also removed from Daniell's plate of Borobudur which, although engraved in 1817, was not included in The History of Java, but did appear in Antiquarian, Architectural, and Landscape Illustrations of the History of Java by the Late Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, F.R.S. published in 1844 (Figure 13).Footnote ⁶⁷ There are a number of drawings of Borobudur by both Dutch and British engineers amongst the sketches compiled by Baker now in the British Museum. A likely basis for Daniell's plate is Cornelius' study (Figure 14) which, although not as populated as his image of Prambanan, also depicts a survey in progress, with Europeans and Javanese measuring and examining the ruin. In the published plate, these figures have been replaced by more passive spectators although, rather bizarrely, Daniell has retained the ladder which leans against the topmost stupa. Also absent are the contemporary pendopos which can be seen at the base of the monument in a drawing attributed to Baker in the British Museum which bears a scored out inscription suggesting that it was the study for Daniell's plate (although there are obvious discrepancies between the two images).Footnote ⁶⁸ Similarly, there is no sign of the small shelter depicted at the apex of the monument in another of the Baker drawings which has been crossed out and labelled with the directive “dele” (deleatur) in pencil.Footnote ⁶⁹ Such intrusions, it seems, could not be allowed to disrupt the picturesque qualities of the ruin.

Figure 13. William Daniell, Temple of Bóro Bódor, in the District of Bóro in Kedú (plate 46 from Antiquarian, Architectural, and Landscape Illustrations of the History of Java by the Late Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, F.R.S., London: 1844) 1817, aquatint

Figure 14. H. C. Cornelius or Dutch draftsman working with Cornelius, View of the Very Remarkable Ruines Called by the Javanees Borro Boodoor (from an album of 65 drawings: No. 11 Original Drawings for the Engravings in the History of Java vol. 3: 65 Plans and Drawings of Boro Bodor, Brambanan, Gûnûng Prao, and Other Temples in Java when in a Non Perfect State, by M. Cornelius and his Draftsmen, 1807. George Baker) c. 1807–15, watercolour and pen and ink. © The Trustees of the British Museum (1939.3–11.06, 1)

Although Daniell's aquatint was the first British print of Borobudur, the delay in its release meant that William Home Lizars' engraving in volume two of Crawfurd's History of the Indian Archipelago … was the first to be made available to the British public (Figure 15).Footnote ⁷⁰ Like Daniell's plate, Lizars' view depicts little sign of habitation or industry despite Crawfurd's observation that the ground surrounding the monument was “cultivated throughout, even to the interstices between the walls of the temple”.Footnote ⁷¹ There is no suggestion in either image of the villages which were located in the vicinity of the monument, one of which had been charged by Raffles to keep “the edifice … as neat & clean & well arranged as its present State of dilapidation will permit” in lieu of government rents or taxes.Footnote ⁷² There is a partial, distant view of terraced hillsides in Lizars' engraving but these are entirely devoid of agricultural workers and the only figures in the scene are shown not at work but in conversation, one with a farm implement resting casually on his shoulder. Set amid a tropical wilderness complete with a shadowed foreground of tumbled vegetation and scattered rock, the ubiquitous cluster of palm trees and a suitably disordered line of collapsed fencing, the scene is imbued with a sense of abandonment and neglect that accords with the feelings which Crawfurd suggested were stirred by the locale.

Figure 15. William Home Lizars, Temple of Boro Budor in Java (plate 15 (frontispiece) from Crawfurd's History of the Indian Archipelago Containing an Account of the Manners, Arts, Languages, Religions, Institutions, and Commerce of Its Inhabitants, Edinburgh: 1820, vol. 2), line engraving

The removal of European figures engaged in the surveys and the Javanese workers in their employ did more than just enable the images to conform with the aesthetic tastes of the day. It also took away any suggestion of an engagement with the contemporary and assisted in perpetuating the stereotype of a static, unchanging Asia inhabited by an apathetic, indolent population. Daniell's Javanese figures engage with the candis neither as venerating postulants nor as inquisitive antiquaries but merely, as Raffles suggested, with “indifference”.Footnote ⁷⁴ Nor do they toil in the surrounding fields despite the fact that many of the temples were situated in landscapes that Baker considered “the most luxuriant pictures of Javanese fertility & rural scenery … well cultivated and populous”.Footnote ⁷⁵ Instead, they are apparently inclined to do little other than promenade in small groups or recline decorously in the manner of the “lolling peasants” who peopled picturesque interpretations of the European landscape, most famously those of the classical landscapist par excellence, Claude Lorrain (1600–82). Lorrain enjoyed an avid following in Britain and his influence on British painting was profound. Daniell's debt to Lorrain was both considered and considerable, and it is significant that he and his uncle, the artist Thomas Daniell, had chosen to take a copy of the Liber Veritatis with them on their travels to, from, and throughout the subcontinent.Footnote ⁷⁶

One of Claude's great virtues, according to his many British admirers, was that he had restored dignity to the contemporary Italian landscape by investing it with allusions to the past. “A painter of landskips in this style, and with this conduct”, noted Sir Joshua Reynolds of Claude in his 1786 address to the students of the Royal Academy, “sends the imagination back into antiquity”.Footnote ⁷⁷ Visual correlations between Daniell's depictions of Java's ruined candis peopled with decoratively idle locals and Claude's Arcadian views of nymphs and shepherds ensured that the contemporary Javanese were associated not so much with a progressive and dynamic present but more with a timeless, classical past. They were, the images implied, part of the landscape, part of the ruin, citizens of a vanished, vanquished empire.

This was an important and recurring theme in British ruin sentiment. When The History of Java first put the island's ruined candis before the British public, the remains of past civilizations stimulated meditations on decay and demise that embraced not only lamentations on personal mortality but also philosophical enquiry into the rise and decline of whole empires. The vast wealth, substantial political power and sophisticated social organization of past civilizations were apparent from the richness of their material remains. Tracing the course of empire outlined in Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage:

ruins became humbling and disturbingly prophetic prompts to speculation on what they had “witnessed” of imperial failure and the ruined candis of Java proved no exception.

The island's architectural remains, so handsomely illustrated in The History of Java, provided clear evidence of the “extensive traces of antiquity, foreign intercourse, and national greatness” that Raffles believed constituted “striking and obvious proofs … of the claims of Java to be considered at one point far advanced in civilization”.Footnote ⁷⁹ For Raffles, this emphasis on Java's former glory was essential. By the time the images of the ruined candis were being published in The History of Java, the British had restored the island to Dutch rule and were looking to reduce their involvement in the archipelago, something Raffles viewed with great misgiving. The underlying thesis of The History of Java was his profound regret over the loss of the island. His intention was to convince his British audience of the very great mistake that the restitution represented, in the process providing justification for his own policies and activities while Lieutenant-Governor of the island.

The ruin images and commentaries published in The History of Java, then, responded not only to the taste for the picturesque but were also deeply informed by Raffles' belief that the British had forgone a significant opportunity to establish their power in the region amongst a people who had once boasted an advanced civilization and were therefore an appropriate (and lucrative) target for British attentions. He was eager to portray Java as a worthwhile colony populated by a people capable of improvement, and the island's architectural remains were of particular importance to his argument. They provided incontrovertible proof that the island's population, at least at one time, had possessed outstanding abilities:

History – and the candis – Raffles suggested, proved the Javanese to be a people with great potential.

Inevitably, praise for Java's past led to unflattering comparisons with its present. The striking contrast between the ruinous state of the candis and what the imagination could conceive to have been not only their former magnificence but also the splendid and flourishing civilizations responsible for their construction, elicited responses that were typical of early nineteenth-century reflections on the fall of empire. In his address to the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences, Raffles felt it might be admissible for him “to lament the contrast of the present times, with ‘times long since past’”.Footnote ⁸¹ Contemporary Javanese society, he observed, bore little evidence of the glory or splendour that the monuments suggested:

In Raffles' estimation, the candis represented more than just the high point of Java's architectural and artistic traditions: their construction represented the most significant event in the island's history, forming “the most interesting part of the annals of the people”.Footnote ⁸³

Certainly no contemporary buildings were thought to equal the ruined candis in splendour or magnificence. The advent of Islam on the island was considered to have been detrimental to Java's artistic and architectural expression, with Crawfurd pronouncing that:

His poor opinion seems to have been shared by others. There do not appear to be any images reproduced either as plates or as vignettes in late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century British publications on the region which take Javanese mosques as their subject matter, and drawings of the same subject seem to be equally rare. The rather indifferent vignette by Justinian Gantz after a drawing by Captain P. J. Begbie of a mosque at Malacca included in Begbie's The Malayan Peninsula (1834) is one of the very few depictions of a mosque anywhere in South-East Asia included in a British publication.Footnote ⁸⁵ Even then, Begbie does not provide any details of the mosque in his description of Malacca and the image functions as nothing more than a visual full stop that separates his texts on Malacca and Penang.

Images of Java's kratons are similarly difficult to find. Although he described the island's kratons as the “only modern buildings they possess, of any architectural importance”,Footnote ⁸⁶ Raffles provided only a fairly perfunctory description of their general layout within The History of Java running to little more than one page. There are no images in either volume of his publication which take the contemporary kraton as their subject, even for the plates of Javanese figures by Daniell where such a setting would have been highly appropriate. Instead, images such as A Javan in the Court Dress and A Javan in the War Dress have only distant or very partial reference to court architecture.Footnote ⁸⁷

Two images which do represent rare instances in which contemporary court architecture was reproduced in print form for the British reading public can be found in Major William Thorn's Memoir of the Conquest of Java (1815).Footnote ⁸⁸ This publication includes numerous views of Dutch forts seized and occupied by the British as well as other subjects, such as the Stadhuis, which were associated with the British victory and the relinquishing of Dutch political power on the island. Amongst these are views of the kraton at Palembang and of Taman Sari, the Water Castle at Yogyakarta, but these provide little in the way of detailed information on the impressive architecture of the contemporary kraton.Footnote ⁸⁹ As the title of Thorn's publication suggests, the theme of the Palembang and Taman Sari prints is not so much a salute to their architectural forms as a celebration of British military prowess, with the kratons represented as spent and notorious forces.

There are undercurrents of this theme in the History of Java plates, for the only “palace” which is illustrated is one in ruins: Walker's engraving Southeast View of the Palace at Kulásan near Prambánan (actually the Buddhist Candi Sari) (Figure 16), which forms the full page frontispiece to Raffles' chapter on antiquities. By omitting an illustration of contemporary kraton architecture in favour of a plate of what was assumed to be a ruined palace, The History of Java images subtly reinforced the conclusions of Raffles and others regarding the island's contemporary courts: that they were the seats of a deeply flawed power presiding over a culture in decline.

Figure 16. John Walker, S. E. View of the Palace at Kulásan near Prambánan (plate from Thomas Stamford Raffles' The History of Java, London: 1817, vol. 2, opp. p. 1), line engraving

Aware of the tastes of their audiences and thoroughly trained in the genre, artists, whether intentionally or not, underscored such sentiments by portraying South-East Asia's ruined candis, pagodas and monuments using the visual parlance of the British picturesque. The picturesque transformed South-East Asia's architectural remains into ruins, images which were loaded with readily understood meanings associated with social, political and cultural decay. By employing the same visual vocabulary that was commonly used to express ideas about the passing of empire, particularly that of Rome, artists depicting South-East Asia's less familiar architectural remains provided readily recognizable cues to British audiences which ensured that they would be read as allegories for the political and cultural degeneration of the region's peoples. The ruin imagery made the decline of South-East Asia's societies seem both natural and inevitable and underscored the message that the candis were subject to both a physical and a social decay: they existed both in and within a ruinous state.