Painting under glass was widely practised in Indonesia between the end of the 19th century and the 1970s. It was so successful that almost all Javanese iconography was reproduced on this medium. However, as works on other media (paper, wood, leather) have survived less well over time, reverse glass paintings give us access to a range of images that would be hard to find elsewhere.

In my talk, I will focus on the question of modernity. During the span of time mentioned above, reverse glass painting has been a kind of emblem of “modernity”, not only by virtue of the medium itself but because of the models these paintings reproduced, the images they displayed and the ideas they conveyed.

Based on a corpus of several hundred items, my aim is to show that iconography on glass can contribute to the study of Javanese history in the 19^th – 20^th centuries, and in particular enable us to better apprehend and understand iconographic tastes and uses, of course, as well as the circulation of ideas, both religious and political, within the different strata of colonial society in its non-European components.