Gezicht op Tobolsk 1771

Jan Caspar Philips made this print, entitled “View of Tobolsk,” sometime in the 18th century. It depicts the capital of Siberia, a place associated with the banishment of criminals and political dissidents during the Russian Empire. The image is imbued with the visual codes of the Dutch Golden Age. Philips, though born in Germany, worked in Amsterdam, the center of the print market, where he became a sought-after maker of cityscapes. The inclusion of ships, figures clustered on the shore, and a high horizon line were all typical of the era, but this is no ordinary port. The city is far away; the figures, perhaps convicts, appear wary and disheveled, and the ships are not grand men-of-war. Philips turns the visual rhetoric of empire against itself. What was once a symbol of Dutch power and trade now suggests a place of exile and suffering. To understand this image better, we can consider how places function as prisons through the study of geography, penal history, and the history of cartography. In doing so, we see how art can serve as a commentary on power.