The Kedawong Sugar Mill near Pasuruan on Jawa by H.Th. Hesselaar

The most striking fact about this 1849 painting of a sugar mill in Java: the painter, H.Th. Hesselaar, was born right there in Pasuruan. He grew up inside the world he put on canvas. The Kedawong Sugar Mill near Pasuruan on Jawa hangs at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The Dutch flag and white mill buildings announce whose enterprise this was. But Hesselaar's eye keeps drifting to the workers, hauling bundles across the courtyard. And then, tucked in the lower right corner, his signature.

Sugar was the economic engine of the Dutch East Indies in the mid-1800s. Hesselaar, born in 1820, died in 1858 at thirty-eight. Only a small group of his paintings survive. This canvas offers a rare view of colonial Java through the eyes of someone who lived there.

His signature sits in the corner of a world he documented and then left too early. What else did he see that we will never know?