John Lynn

Nolan, Anneville, Newtown, Waterford, Eire
Richard Green Ltd., London
Acquired from above by present owner (17 January, 1978)

John Lynn was a painter of landscapes and seascapes active in London for about a decade beginning in 1828.

The scene depicted here is a historical event from the not too distant past. Between February and August 1810, during the Napoleonic Wars, British forces invaded the Dutch owned Maluku Islands (or the Moluccas), an archipelago in eastern Indonesia also known as the Spice Islands. Lynn shows several British ships, including the Caroline and the Piedmontaise, destined for the Banda Islands, arriving at Banda Neira, where they successfully overtook the Dutch stronghold.

After the Dutch surrender, Captain Charles Foot, of Piedmontaise, was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of the Banda Islands; he would take a leading role in planning and executing the British invasion of Java the following year and was knighted in 1812. The Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1814 restored the islands as well as Java to the Dutch, and the islands remained part of the Dutch East Indies, a colony of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, until Indonesia's independence in 1949.