During the 1930s, Bali became home to the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, musicologist Colin McPhee, and the artists Miguel Covarrubias and Walter Spies. Djemul by Rudolf Bonnet (1949)īonnet’s arrival on Bali in 1929 was followed by an influx of Europeans all who wanted to learn about and record the lives of the Balinese people. Rudolf Bonnet took over Spies’ house in Ubud where he set up his own studio. Nine years later Spies moved out of the town and built himself a mountain retreat in Iseh. Soon after arriving on the island Bonnet met the German artist Walter Spies, who had come to the Dutch East Indies in 1923 and settled in Bali four years later in the town of Ubud. Bonnet, in this portrait, has honestly revealed himself to us. It is a self-portrait which does not hide his physical facial gauntness and the receding hairline which cannot disguise his premature ageing. The artist surveys us out of the corner of his eye. The painting was completed at a time in the artist’s life when he had begun to yearn for inspiration and an experience outside the comforts of European living. It is a stunningly meditative depiction of the artist at a time in his life when he was struggling to find inspiration and motivation outside his safe and comfortable European lifestyle. In 1927, a year before leaving for the Dutch East Indies, Bonnet, aged thirty-two, completed a self-portrait. Rudolf remained in Italy for eight years. The town was the home of an artists’ colony and many of the young inhabitants would pose as models for the this thriving artistic community. Rudolf loved the area south of Rome known as Anticoli Corrado. In 1920, when he was twenty-five, Rudolf Bonnet along with his parents took a vacation to Italy.

He also attended evening classes at the Rijksacademie van Beeldende Kunsten. After normal Primary schooling he received artistic education at a technical High School where he studied decorative painting. and his mother was Elisabeth Elsina Mann, and both were of Huguenot descent, and were bakers. It was during his journeys away from his homeland to the East Indies which saw his artistic talent blossom. He was one of the most individualistic artists who travelled and painted in the Dutch East Indies during the first half of the 20th century and he stood head and shoulders above his fellow European artists who visited the island of Bali. He was born in Amsterdam on March 30 th 1895, although, as we will see, he spent most of his life in the town of Ubud on the Indonesian island of Bali. Today I am looking at the life and work of the Dutch painter Johan Rudolf Bonnet.

My next two blogs were requested by a reader of my site and so I always try and fulfil requests, here is the first one.

The Wild Hunt by Elizabeth Chadwick