987
The Crafts Album included photographs of local
industries.
The Historical Album included portraits of the Rus-
sian military men photographed in action during the
military expedition to Middle Asia and also included
landscapes and views of the Turkistan Territory from
the numerous fortresses.
The Turkistan Album was a main and monumental
photographic work in Russia during those times. No
other Russian territory was so systematically and com-
pletely photographed as the Turkistan Territory was
because of Nekhoroshev’s photographs. The greatest
value of the album was the fact that the life of the
territory’s nations was photographed from nature. The
leading Russian art critic V. Stasov expressed his high
praise and opinion of the album. He found the photo-
graphs therein valuable, and not just to the sphere of
documentation and ethnography, but to Russian culture
as well. Stasov mentioned that “each photograph is a
really folk image...truly and picturesquely showing the
Turkistan customs and life.”
Alexei Loginov
NETHERLANDS
The invention of photography was announced in The
Netherlands as soon as in other countries; newspapers
and magazines reported on it in 1839, especially after
the fi rst public demonstrations of the process in Paris.
The fi rst Dutchman to take up a camera was the Amster-
dam painter and dealer in artists’ materials Christiaan
Julius Lodewijk Portman (1799–1868), who exhibited
three daguerreotypes (maybe a few more) at an art
exhibition held in October 1839 in The Hague. Some
of these were made in Paris—where he is supposed to
have acquired equipment for making daguerreotypes
—some in Amsterdam and The Hague. Portman’s da-
guerreotypes are unknown nowadays and it is uncertain
whether he took up photography as a way of earning
money or as an interesting experiment. It was prob-
ably he who translated into Dutch one of Daguerre’s
manuals; it was published in a magazine, not separately.
After the fi rst few practitioners had come and gone and
many an article had been published in newspapers and
magazines in 1839, photography seemed to slip out of
public notice for about two years. In 1842 a number of
itinerant photographers took up the medium. Well into
the 1850s most photographers travelled from one city
to the other, often staying only a few days. Setting up a
temporary studio in a hotel, an inn or at a private house,
they sometimes showed specimens of their work in
the shopwindows of local art dealers. Judging by their
names, most of these itinerant photographers seem to
have been French (or Belgian). However, it was re-
cently discovered that the best known of these, Edouard
François, who in his newspaper advertisements implied
that he was Parisian, was actually a young Dutchman,
Eduard de Prouw. He took on a French name to make
a better impression onto his clientele: all things French
had a good reputation in those days. Moreover, the
pseudonym suggested he had been trained in one of
the main centres of photography. Instead of returning
each winter to Paris, as his newspaper announcements
suggest, he lived in the Dutch capital all his life. Due
to the fact that only in the other seasons was there suf-
fi cient light to make photographs, he was only active
as a photographer part of the year, practising another
(unidentifi ed) job in winter. Those who really came from
abroad sometimes visited The Netherlands as part of a
larger journey from France and/or Belgium to the north
west of Germany. For instance, Louis Lumière, who
was the second person known to have been working as
a daguerreotypist in The Netherlands—he demonstrated
the process in the Hague in November 1839—was also
active in Ghent and Antwerp (October–November 1839)
and in Bremen (January 1840). He is believed to have
been a Parisian merchant, but his name is not to be found
in the literature of early French photography. The same
applies to the others who visited The Netherlands: A.
Derville (1842), F. la Moile (1848–1850, 1852–1853),
and Louis Schweig (1846, 1853). Besides foreigners,
Dutch photographers also travelled the country. Most
of these earliest photographers are known to us mainly
through advertisements and articles in the press, rather
than through their works, which have either not survived
or are unidentifi ed today.
The earliest photographer from whom a signifi cant
body has survived is the Amsterdam amateur Eduard
Isaac Asser (1809–1894), a lawyer by profession. Some
fi fteen daguerreotypes and four albums with about 200
prints were kept in the family until recently, when the
whole collection was transferred to the Rijksmuseum
in Amsterdam. Asser often directed his camera to-
wards his family and friends and also photographed
quite a few still-lifes and cityscapes. Only a few of
Asser’s photographs are dated, but he seems to have
made most of them in the fi rst half of the 1850s. The
photographs in the four albums especially introduce
us into the world of a well-to-do Amsterdam family.
Unfortunately, Asser did not caption the prints, nor did
he leave any written account of his working methods
or aesthetic considerations. Some of his portraits have
a charm and liveliness that is lacking in most portraits
made by professional photographers. As far as we know,
Louis Wegner (1816–1864) was the only professional
photographer who did portraits in a “grand manner” in
the 1850s. A series of four rather large portraits he made
of the painter Nicolaas Pieneman is noteworthy.
From the late 1850s onwards, most professional
photographers set up a permanent studio instead of