989
or to master (requiring less fi nancial investments and
technical-chemical skills), there may have been some
charlatans in photography, many of whom were active at
fairs or still wandering from one small town or village to
another. Several photographers complained about these
less appreciated “colleagues.” (Sometimes a photogra-
pher would accuse a rival of being a quack, evidently
one of the worst insults one could think of.) It is not
unlikely, however, that these complaints were mainly
prompted by the wish of established photographers to
be accepted as full-fl edged citizens or even artists. As it
has already been pointed out, the photographer’s social
status still left much to be desired.
On the one hand, feeling superior to people who
made their money on fairs or by roaming around,
photographers must have felt much less secure about
their relationship with the arts. They so often presented
themselves as artists—especially by calling themselves
“peintres-photographes” and by surrounding their names
by images of putti, palettes, and other symbols of the
arts on the back of their photographs—and that strongly
suggests a wish to be equalled with traditional artists.
The latter will not always have appreciated these efforts
to claim or reach the status artists held. Photography was
not considered an art. On the contrary, it was judged a
technical invention that required certain skills but no
artistic mastery. The camera did most of the work, not
the photographer. Painters or engravers hardly ever
expressed themselves upon this subject, but art critics
were more outspoken. Photography might be useful as
a documentary means—it was especially appreciated as
a way to reproduce works of art—but it lacked artistic
qualities. The ways of reasoning will have been about
the same as in any other country.
To be sure, most portrait photographs did lack artistic
merit. Carte-de-visite portraits are done in the same way
to an astonishing degree. Variation was a word not in the
photographer’s vocabulary. The same props were used
over and over again: tables, seats, carpets, columns,
balustrades, in later decades also painted backgronds.
The setting and postures were regardless of the persons
depicted. It is striking that the wealthy, amateur pho-
tographer Alexandrine Tinne (1835–1869) used exactly
the same props when she made some portraits of her
relatives in the garden of her house in The Hague in
1860–1861. The same applies to a series of domestic
scenes the amateur photographer Jordaan Everhard van
Rheden made in the 1860s and 1870s. One would have
expected an amateur to feel free to deviate from the
stereotype settings professionals took to.
Regarding the invention or development of new
techniques or apparatus, Dutch photographers were
not in the front row. They merely followed what was
being done abroad. At fi rst France was the country
that was looked upon as a source of things new, later
Germany took over this role. There have been a few ex-
hibitions—especially those in Amsterdam in 1855 and
1860—where foreign photographers like Gustave Le
Gray, Edouard Baldus, and the Bisson brothers showed
their works, but this seems not to have stimulated Dutch
photography very much. There is no sign that it changed
much after these exhibitions took place. Photographers
still clung to making portraits; cityscapes, art reproduc-
tions and the like were produced on a much smaller
scale. Landscapes are quite rare in Dutch photography
and until the advent of Pictorialism (picturalisme in
Dutch) in the 1890s “free photography” hardly existed.
Amateurs were an exception to this, but their number
was relatively modest. However, they hold an impor-
tant place among the photographers who have left a
considerable oeuvre that is still appreciated nowadays
for its artistic qualities. Besides Asser and Tinne three
men should be mentioned who were active in the last
decade of the 19th century: the painter Georg Hendrik
Breitner (1857–1923), his friend and colleague Willem
Witsen (1860–1923), and the architect and headmaster
of a technical school Jacob Olie (1834–1905). Breitner
and Olie photographed extensively on the streets in Am-
sterdam and did portraits—Breitner also photographed
many nudes—while Witsen mainly took portraits of his
fellow artists and of young contemporary writers. All
three made pictures that lack the stiffness and cold-
ness of professional work. As they did not take part
in exhibitions and their work was not known outside
their own circles, they did not have any infl uence on the
course of Dutch photography. Other amateurs united
in societies that were founded in many a Dutch town
from 1887 onwards. This was due to the introduction
of smaller, easier to handle cameras and readymade
negative plates. Some amateurs were quite serious about
their hobby, others were just making snapshots without
giving much attention to composition and other aspects
of photographic aesthetics.
Snapshot photographers were fi ercely attacked for
lowering the average level—especially by the Picto-
rialists who wanted photography to be accepted as an
art form rather than considered just a pleasant pastime.
Pictorialism rose in the 1890s and was to dominate the
scene after the turn of the century. It recruited its fol-
lowers from both professionals and amateurs. They not
only turned against the snapshot photographers who
were criticised for being too unpretentious, but they
also scorned the way most professional portrait pho-
tographers conceived their occupation. The Pictorialists
took offence at the props used over an over again and
at the large amount of retouching which made people
look like “billiard balls” or “wax statues..” Instead,
Pictorialists like P. Clausing, C.M. Dewald, and C.E.
Mögle wanted to do justice to their sitters by treating
them as individuals. No portrait should be the same, as