In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck founded a small Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope to serve as a staging post for Dutch East India Company (VOC) ships on the way from the Netherlands to Batavia (present-day Jakarta). By 1795, when the VOC lost its authority over the Cape, the colony had developed into a vital crossroads between East and West. The resulting cultural hybridisation was inevitably reflected in the local style of domestic furniture, which is the subject of this lecture series.
The craftsmen who worked at the Cape were generally former VOC soldiers or seamen, or slaves from the Far East. Their names can be found in documentary sources like the VOC archives now preserved in the Dutch National Archives.
These archives are an important source of information for this seminar, permitting us to reconstruct the way people furnished their homes at the Cape.
Timetable
Timetable 2008-2009
Method of Instruction
Seminar meetings
Required reading
N. Worden (ed.),_ Contingent Lives. Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World_, Cape Town 2007
T.M. Eliëns (ed.), Domestic Interiors at the Cape and in Batavia 1602-1795, Zwolle/The Hague 2002
Examination
Presentation and paper