In 1810, a Dutch-Surinamese artist named Gerrit Schouten built a small scene — five women preparing cassava under a thatched roof, a chicken at their feet, a blue parrot craning its neck toward the workers — out of what was probably a repurposed crate and papier-mâché, backed by a painted screen of clouds and trees. It now sits in the Rijksmuseum, inside a heavy gold frame. The frame is the story: the diorama was sold to a European collector soon after it was made.
Schouten (1779–1839) was born in Paramaribo, probably the first professional Western-style artist born in the Caribbean. Over about thirty years he made miniature scenes of colonial Suriname — the du celebration central to the social life of enslaved people, Indigenous camps, coffee and cotton plantations, the lawns of Government Square. Thirty survive: six at the Rijksmuseum, twelve at the Wereldmuseum.
- One figure in that 1810 camp has darker skin and close-cropped hair, and may be a Maroon — someone who escaped slavery and found refuge among the local population; the others are probably Arawak.
- Schouten’s father Hendrik was a Dutch administrator and writer; his mother Suzanna Hansen was a free woman of color from a prosperous and at times notorious family. His great-great-aunt Elisabeth Samson owned a coffee plantation and in 1767 became the first Black woman in Suriname to marry a white man.
- Hendrik Schouten wrote the first known literary work in Surinamese creole, Een huishoudelijke twist, a domestic quarrel alternating between Dutch and Sranantongo — the language that mixed English, Dutch, and the West and Central African languages spoken by enslaved people.
- He made the du six times. In the Rijksmuseum’s 1830 version, eleven figures dance and play music to the narration of the afrankeri, the female leader who was often a free woman of color.
- The word “diorama” was not coined until 1822, two decades after Schouten began working. His miniature “perspective theaters” belong to an earlier form, and the base of each scene angles down toward the viewer like a stage.
- He died in 1839, the same year the Société ethnologique de Paris was formed — by then his dioramas had circulated in Europe for years, “anticipating the scientific craze for the Other.”
Mathilde Montpetit’s note refuses the easy read in both directions. These are an unusually rich visual record of a slave society and, at the same time, objects made to be owned — brought into metropolitan drawing rooms in frames built for paintings. She quotes Bachelard: “The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it.”
Whose world, exactly, is on display stays the open question. Schouten was a fourth-generation descendant of enslaved people, and that is precisely the thing he could not be asked.