Raden Saleh was born into a noble Javanese family. He was the grandson of Sayyid Abdullah Bustaman on his mother's side. His father was Sayyid Husen bin Alwi bin Awal bin Yahya, an Indonesian of Arab descent.
Young Raden Saleh was first taught in Bogor by the Belgian artist A.J. Payen. Payen acknowledged the youth's talent, and persuaded the colonial government of the Netherlands to send Raden Saleh to the Netherlands to study art. He arrived in Europe in 1829 and began to study under Cornelius Kruseman and Andries Schelfhout.
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 Ernst I, Grand Duke of Saxe-Coburg-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.
Raden Saleh's house in Cikini.
Raden Saleh returned to Dutch East Indies in 1852, after living in Europe for 20 years. He worked as conservator for the colonial collection of government art and continued painting portraits of the Javanese aristocracy, and many more landscape paintings. Returning to Java, he expressed his uneasiness of living in the colonies, stating that "here, people only talks about coffee and sugar, then sugar and coffee." in one his letters.
Upon returning, Saleh built a house in Cikini, based on the Callenberg Castle of which he stayed in during his European travels c. 1844. Surrounded by vast grounds, most of the them was converted into public gardens in 1862, and were closed in the turn of the century. In 1960, Taman Ismail Marzuki was built in the former gardens. The house itself is still used today as a hospital.
He married a young aristocratic woman of Yogyakarta Sultanate, Raden Ayu Danudirdja, in 1867 and subsequently moved to Bogor, where he rent a house near 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, German, 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 passed away in 31 July 1880, following her husband's own demise 3 months earlier.
On Friday morning, 23 April 1880, Saleh suddenly fell sick. He claimed that he was poisoned by one of his servants, but later examination showed that his blood flow was disrupted due to a clot near his heart. Saleh was buried two days later in Kampung Empang, Bogor. As reported in Javanese Bode newspaper, 28 April 1880, his funeral was "attended by various land lords and Dutch officials, and even by curious students from nearby school.
Source : Americana Encyclopedia
Sejarah Pelukis Raden Saleh
