Statue of Raden Saleh at Ragunan Zoo

Painter Raden Saleh, who died on April 23, 1880, has been honored with a sculpture at the Ragunan Zoo in South Jakarta, but the two-year-old monument remains controversial.

The statue of Indonesia’s modern painting pioneer Raden Saleh abruptly “appeared” amid the Indonesian fine-art community’s struggle for Raden Saleh to be recognized as a national hero.

However, art circles in the country may be surprised to see that the monument stands at Ragunan Zoo instead of on a main thoroughfare like Jl. MH Thamrin, or at the National Monument park in Central Jakarta. Nor has it been placed on Jl. Cikini, in the yard of the Taman Ismail Marzuki art center, land that belonged to Raden Saleh 164 years ago.

Raden Saleh’s statue was inaugurated on Aug. 20, 2014, exactly on Ragunan Zoo’s 150th anniversary. An official at the zoo said the sculpture was connected with the history of Raden Saleh’s love of wildlife. For this reason, the statue depicts the artist accompanied by an orangutan, seen standing and waving.

The bronze sculpture created by Yogyakarta artist Dunadi is a bust of Raden Saleh of good precision. The rather large statue was donated to the zoo by the Arsari Djojohadikusumo Foundation, founded by its namesake’s son Hashim Djojohadikusumo, who served at the time as chairman of the Ragunan Zoo supervisory board.

Nonetheless, with due gratitude to the Arsari Foundation and Hashim, the presence of the statue at the zoo has actually disappointed the fine-art community. Raden Saleh’s encounter with animals is just one side of his life story.

Raden Saleh (1807-1880) came from an aristocratic family in Semarang. Owing to his painting skill and love of vegetation, he was taken to Bogor in West Java, where he studied botany while learning fine art from AAJ Payen, a Belgian painter and architect. In the following years, with the encouragement of JC Baud, Raden Saleh settled in Holland to hone his painting talent under C. Kruseman and A. Schelfhout.

In Europe, he got acquainted with Piere Henri Martin, a circus animal tamer, which inspired Raden Saleh’s love for animals, which he started using as subjects for his art. He even roamed as far as the Algerian Desert in Africa to find wildlife to paint. Then painted the animal world in various scenes of adventure and fighting.

It’s the dramatic paintings of animals, among other work, that made Raden Saleh a legendary painter. His monumental works included Berburu Rusa (Deer Hunting, 1846) , which was sold in 1996 for S$2.8 million (US$1.99 million, in 1996) at Christie’s Singapore auction.

When he returned to Java in 1851, Raden Saleh conducted a cross-country expedition on horseback from Batavia, now Jakarta, to Semarang, via Karang Sambong, Palimanan and Majalengka. During the long journey, he observed diverse plants and animals, recording them in sketches.

The engrossing mission prompted Saleh to set up a painting studio and gallery in a village near Salatiga. There he occasionally turned his animal sketches into oil paintings. This was done at intervals during his work duplicating the works of painters from the Dusseldorf school, including Schroetter, Achenbach and Lessing, whose originals were at his studio. He made duplications so that when officials asked to buy or borrow works, he could give them the duplicates, or his animal paintings.

One day Saleh was introduced to Constancia Winckelhaagen, the owner of particuliare landerijen (private estates) in Gemulak-Semarang. The rich widow soon married Saleh and financed the construction of his Batavia residence in 1852. Resembling a palace, the house is now the Cikini Hospital on Jl. Raden Saleh.

Winckelhaagen also facilitated Saleh’s hobby of raising animals, which he did on a vast plot that in 1864 was named “Planten en Dierentuin” (Park and Zoo). When Saleh died in 1880, his park was managed by a cultural association that was later taken over by the Indonesian government in 1949.

The animals at Raden Saleh’s zoo were later moved to the Ragunan Zoo. Meanwhile, his park area in Cikini became the Taman Ismail Marzuki art center in the late 1960s.

Raden Saleh and animals indeed had “family ties”, but animals were just one of the multiple aspects of his exalted character, which saw him devote his skills to the worlds of humans, land, mountains, flora and other natural objects.

He was the first Eastern/Southern indigenous artist capable of penetrating the “palaces” of Holland and Germany through his portrait painting. He also captured the scenery of Java in a way that thrilled the touristic minds of Europeans. His wide and complex body of work shows that animals were only a small part of his life and interests.

It would be odd for the one-and-a-half-century-old legacy of this great and complete fine-art figure to be linked merely with wildlife. So, as the maestro’s monument hospitably guides visitors to the compounds of turkeys, hippos and crocodiles, the question arises: Was Raden Saleh just a great animal lover?

The time has come for the Ministry of Education and Culture to reconstruct the myth of Raden Saleh so that this figure is appropriately remembered as a painter and a cultural luminary, rather than a mere lover of horses, monkeys and jungle fowls.

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