Mooi Indie, a Dutch term meaning ‘Beautiful Indies’, referred to a style of painting in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period. Mooi Indie painters included mostly Dutch and other European painters living in Indonesia, as well as a small number of local Indonesian painters. Mooi Indie paintings were characterised by the depiction of beautiful landscapes in a naturalistic and romantic manner. The term began to be in use after artist Sindu Sudjojono’s writings during the late 1930s and early 1940s that attacked established ideas and values in the art world and particularly derided the Mooi Indie Style as merely beautiful without any social context.
