LOT 817 Auke Cornelis Sonnega Catalogue: Modern & Contemporary Southeast Asian Art
Singapore, 22 August 2025

LOT 817

Auke Cornelis Sonnega
(1910 - 1963, Dutch)

Three Balinese Girls (The Morning of a Festival Day)
painted in 1956
oil on canvas
70 x 60 cm
signed and dated on lower right


S$ 25,000 - 35,000
US$ 19,410 - 27,175

Literature:
Didier Hamel, Auke Sonnega: Artist of the Enchanting Tropics, Jakarta: Hexart Publishing, 2011; illustration 47 (p. 32), illustration 191 (p.123), illustration 265 (p. 167).

Provenance:
- Acquired directly from the artist by the previous owner
- Private Collection, Asia

Pick up point: Singapore

Brushing Away Time: The Remarkable Discovery of a Sonnega Original

The image of young Balinese women is a well-known trope in Dutch colonial paintings of Indonesia and, more widely, the idealism found in figurative works, village scenes and landscapes is widely represented in paintings by artists from Europe who came to Bali to seek a paradise that seemed to be increasingly elusive in the early part of the 20th century. Auke Cornelis Sonnega was one of these people. It would be misleading to assume that the Western view of Bali as a paradise that built upon the modernist legacy of Gauguin was confined to colonists: Indonesian, Southeast Asian and Chinese émigré artists such as the Nanyang pioneers of Singapore found in Bali a place where the dominant Hindu religion fused with Buddhist and animist beliefs created a mood and atmosphere quite different from the other islands in the Malay archipelago. This intangible quality, combined with numerous public festivals and the physical beauty of a young population, created a magical essence that numerous artists aimed to capture.

Sonnega was a gifted writer, and he expressed clearly the specialness of Bali:

Thanks to the richness of the soil and its good irrigation, the luxuriance of the palm-tops is notably in evidence, even exaggerated; it overshadows the villages and the lanes, giving to the island a peculiar charm of its own. The picture is completed by the well-proportioned shapes of the Balinese: the muscular figure of the male, who, clad only in a loin-cloth works in the fields, striking classical attitudes under the scorching rays of the tropical sun; or the Balinese woman, often so graceful, walking with typical balanced movements. These people have known how to choose colours so suited to the surrounding trees and undergrowth: brave direct colours in which they deck out their gods and dancers, and which have earned them world-wide renown.1
The Morning of a Festival Day, painted in Ubud in September 1956, was exhibited at Auke Sonnega’s exhibition in Surabaya in the December of the same year.2 A photograph shows the artist with this work at the exhibition,3 and it was also reproduced as the front cover of the magazine Dian.4 The details in the composition ring true for the festival day of the title: the kendi that the figure in red carries, the Balinese cone-shaped subeng (meaning 'peace' or 'pure' ) earrings that all three women wear. Stylistically, the gentle faceting of the figures and flattening of the planes to create surface pattern reveal something of Sonnega's background in textile design in the Art Deco period.

Had he not moved to Indonesia in 1935 to join his sister in Jakarta, Sonnega might never have become a painter. As a Dutchman, his route to the then-Dutch colony of the East Indies was relatively straightforward. Born in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, he had originally trained in textile design at the School of Arts and Crafts in Amsterdam, followed by further study at the Utrecht School of Art and some years working as a designer in industry. After arriving in Jakarta, he initially made his living as a graphic designer and then a newspaper travel writer. But he shortly underwent a series of transformations that took him from the world of decorative and applied arts into the more rarified and unpredictable world of fine art.

In 1937 he met the influential German painter Walter Spies in Ubud when travelling through Bali on one of his frequent travelogue trips on his Harley-Davidson – a treasured possession that he brought with him from home. The magical realism of the older artist’s paintings seemed to unleash externally the spirituality within Sonnega that had been inculcated from childhood from being raised by parents who followed Theosophy after rejecting their own strict Calvinist upbringing. Sonnega had been present at the 1929 meeting in which Jiddu Krishnamurti, who had been pushed forward as the figurehead of the Theosophist Movement, rejected its doctrine and advocated the need for all individuals to seek out their own spiritual paths based on a personal, existential response to phenomena.5 In the early 1950s he met English linguist Husein Rofé, who had converted to Islam and was instrumental in spreading to the West the interfaith, spiritualist teachings of R.M. Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo (1901-1987), founder of Subud. Sonnega absorbed and internalised the teaching of Subud, and the personalised spirituality that the guru advocated he brought to his paintings.

Just two years after he painted The Morning of a Festival Day, Sonnega, after 23 years in Indonesia, returned to the Netherlands. Political pressures had become too much and, despite the fact the President Sukarno collected his artworks, the dictate passed in 1957 forced many Dutch residents to return home; as a practitioner of the "liberal professions"6 Sonnega left his studio in Ubud – the old studio of Rudolf Bonnet, with whom he had become friends and who also had to leave the country – and retired to Delft, where he died five years later.


Viv Lawes
Programme Director, Art History, Sotheby’s Institute of Art
Course Leader, University of the Arts London
Senior Lecturer, City & Guilds of London Art School





It should be noted that when the book on Sonnega was published by Hexart Publishing back in 2011, the whereabout of the painting was unknown. The pictures on the book were produced based upon Sonnega's own files. The present lot is still mounted on the original frame as shown in the book.


1 Auke Sonnega, A Facet of the Cosmic Pattern, Trans. Husein Rofé. Published by Michael Rogge, 2021: https://wichm.home.xs4all.nl/sonnega.html
2 Didier Hamel, Auke Sonnega: Artist of the Enchanting Tropics, Jakarta: Hexart Publishing, 2011; illustration 191, p.123
3 Ibid. illustration 47, photograph by Nikola Drakulie
4 Ibid. Dian, Issue 5, Didier Hamel, Auke Sonnega: Artist of the Enchanting Tropics, Jakarta: Hexart Publishing, 2011; illustration 265, p. 167
5 Bruce W Carpenter, Auke Sonnega – Bali’s First Spiritual Artist, Indonesia Expat, July 16 2012; https://indonesiaexpat.id/featured/auke-sonnega-balis-first-spiritual-artist/
6 Keesing's Record of World Events, Volume XI, December 1957, Indonesia, Netherlands, p.15,931; https://web.stanford.edu/group/tomzgroup/pmwiki/uploads/1024-1957-12-KS-a-AMS.pdf

Condition Report

The painting is in good condition. The canvas is in plane, free of deformations and under adequate tension. Paint layers are intact and in stable condition. No retouching was detected under UV light examination. The painting is offered with frame.


Please note that this report has been compiled by Larasati staff based solely on their observation on the work. Larasati specialists are not professional conservators; thus the report should be treated only as an expression of opinion and not as a statement of fact. We suggest that you consult your own restorer for a more thorough report. We remind you again that all work is sold 'as is' and should be viewed personally by you or your professional adviser before the sale to assess its condition.

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