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Raden Saleh Sjarif Boestaman (, EYD: ; , DIN: ; 1811 – 23 April 1880) Raden Saleh: The Romantic Aristocrat was a pioneering Romanticism painter from the Dutch East Indies of Arab Indonesians-Javanese people ethnicity. He was considered to be the first "modern" artist from Indonesia (then the Dutch East Indies), and his paintings corresponded with nineteenth-century romanticism which was popular in Europe at the time. He also expressed his cultural roots and inventiveness in his work.
It was from Kruseman that Raden Saleh studied his skills in portraiture, and later was accepted at various European courts where he was assigned to do portraits. While in Europe, in 1836 Saleh became the first indigenous Indonesian to be initiated into Freemasonry. From 1839, he spent five years at the court of Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who became an important patron.
From Schelfhout, Raden Saleh furthered his skills as a landscape painter. Raden Saleh visited several European cities, as well as Algiers. In The Hague, a lion tamer allowed Raden Saleh to study his lion, and from that his most famous painting of animal fights was created, which subsequently brought fame to the artist. Many of his paintings were exhibited at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Several of his paintings were destroyed when the Colonial Dutch pavilion in Paris was burnt in 1931.
Upon returning, he married a wealthy Indo people heiress of part-German extraction, Constancia von Mansfeld. His new wife financed the construction of Saleh's landhuis or country house on the private domain ( particuliere land) that the couple had acquired, Cikini. Saleh's house was inspired architecturally by Callenberg Castle where he had stayed during his European travels 1844. Surrounded by vast grounds, most of them were converted into public gardens in 1862, and were closed in the turn of the century. In 1960, the Taman Ismail Marzuki was built in the former gardens. The house itself is still used today as a Cikini Hospital and its name is immortalized in a street near the hospital.
On his first wife's death, Saleh remarried to a young aristocratic woman of the Yogyakarta Sultanate, Raden Ayu Danudirdja, in 1867 and subsequently moved to Bogor, where he rented a house near the Bogor Botanical Gardens with a view of Mount Salak. He later took his wife to travel in Europe, visiting countries such as the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy. His wife however contracted an illness while in Paris, the exact illness is still not known, and was so severe that they both immediately returned to Bogor. She died on 31 July 1880, following her husband's death three months earlier.
/ref> however post-mortem examination showed that his circulatory system was disrupted due to a clot near his heart. Saleh was buried two days later in Kampung Empang, Bogor. As reported in the Java-Bode, 28 April 1880, his funeral was "attended by various landlords and Dutch officials, and even by curious students from nearby school."
Many European nobles were amazed by Raden Saleh's paintings, as were the Dutch, they did not expect a young painter from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) to be able to master the techniques and capture the character of western painting, including Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, the family of Queen Victoria, and a number of governors-general such as Johannes van den Bosch, Jean Chrétien Baud, and Herman Willem Daendels. In 1883, an exhibition of Raden Saleh's paintings was held in Amsterdam to commemorate the third anniversary of Saleh's death, on the initiative of King Willem III and Ernst of Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha. Among them were the paintings Burning Forest, Buffalo Hunting in Java, and the Capture of Prince Diponegoro.
The event had been previously painted by a Dutch painter Nicolaas Pieneman, commissioned by Lieutenant General Hendrik Merkus de Kock. It is thought that Saleh saw this painting during his stay in Europe. Saleh made significant changes in his version of the painting; Pieneman painted the scene from the right, Saleh from the left. Pieneman depicts Diponegoro with resigned expression, while in Saleh's he appears to be outraged. Pieneman gave his painting the title Submission of Prince Diponegoro, while Saleh gave The Arrest of Pangeran Diponegoro. It is known that Saleh deliberately painted Diponegoro's Dutch captors with large heads to make them appear monstrous, as opposed to the more proportionally depicted Javanese.
Raden Saleh’s work has been regarded as a sign of incipient nationalism in what was then the Dutch East Indies / Indonesia. This can also be seen it the depiction of Diponegoro's men. Pieneman had never been to the Indies, and so depicted Diponegoro's men in a more Arabic fashion. Saleh's version has a more accurate depiction of native Javanese clothing, with some figures wearing batik and blangkon.
Saleh finished this painting in 1857 and presented it to Willem III of Netherlands in The Hague. It was returned to Indonesia in 1978 as a realization of a cultural agreement between the two countries in 1969, regarding the return of cultural items which were taken, lent, or exchanged to the Dutch in the previous eras. Even though the painting did not fall under any of those categories, because Saleh presented it to the King of the Netherlands and it was never in the possession of Indonesia, it was nevertheless returned as a gift from the Royal Palace of Amsterdam, and is currently displayed at the Merdeka Palace Museum in Jakarta.
In 1953, President Sukarno visited Raden Saleh's tomb. Bung Karno once told Adun that "Raden Saleh was a great Indonesian painter who was widely known in Europe" and assigned the architect Friedrich Silaban to restore his tomb. Behind Raden Saleh's tomb actually lies the tomb of Raden Panoeripan and several of his descendants. It is said that Raden Panoeripan's tomb has been around since the 17th century. Raden Saleh's tomb is currently cared for and guarded by a caretaker who is a direct descendant of Raden Panoeripan.
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