1025
Exhibition of Photography in Amsterdam. The over-
whelming success must have inspired Oosterhuis to
introduce the novelty in his portrait studio and to apply
it also to topography. This brought out the best in him.
The Dutch cityscape would become one of Oosterhuis’s
major genres for the next 25 years. The genre of the
topographically precise cityscape is rooted in a long-
standing north-Netherlandish tradition in drawing and
printmaking. Oosterhuis photographed the views which
topographical artists had depicted before him. Restricted
to a picture plane of barely seven by seven centimetres,
he succeeded in composing remarkably powerful im-
ages by adapting skilfully the proven compositional
schemes.
There was a growing public for Oosterhuis’s stereo-
graphs. Increased tourism and a greater urge to travel
made the publication of stereoscopic views a profi table
undertaking. In the early years Oosterhuis did not ex-
perience much competition from his own countrymen
who catered for the local market. The Parish publisher
Alexis Gaudin & Frères issued the series Hollande in
1858 with 71 views of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The
Hague, Haarlem and Dordrecht. These cities were linked
by rail from 1847 and every tourist took them in on his
tour of the Netherlands, in pursuit of the landscapes
portrayed by famous Dutch 17th-century masters. In the
following years, Oosterhuis had the tourist trail in the
provinces of Holland and Utrecht entirely to himself,
uncontested even by the French company of Adolphe
Braun, whose son Gaston did not visit the Low Coun-
tries until 1864.
After a short-lived collaboration in 1858 or 1859
with an Amsterdam bookseller and publisher, Ooster-
huis published the bulk of his stereographs himself. No
publisher is given on his large collection of almost four-
hundred views, sold as Vues de Hollande in the early
1860s. Following the introduction of the larger cabinet
size for portraits in 1867, Oosterhuis brought out new
series of cityscapes. He continued to make them until
the end of his career and after his death his son Gustaaf
carried on. From the 1870s on virtually all professional
photographers made tourist views. To withstand this
fi erce competition Oosterhuis felt compelled to produce
extensive photographic coverage of Amsterdam and
other places in order to diversify his supply.
By that time Oosterhuis’s career as a portraitist had
come to an end. In 1869 he sold the establisment and
devoted himself entirely to his topographical series as
well as to a new branch of the profession. December
1858 saw the appearance of the fi rst Dutch publication
to be illustrated with “a photograph from nature”: inside
the Praktische Volks-Almanak an albumen stereograph
by Oosterhuis was pasted, showing Dam Square in
Amsterdam. Following the Revue Photographique of
5 March 1858 the author of the accompanying article
quotes the example of a New-York engineer who con-
tracted a photographer to record the daily progress of
building projects spread throughout the United States.
The photographs furnished the engineer with all that he
needed “to direct construction from a distance.” And, the
author asked rhetorically: “Would a Dutch photographer
be capable of an achievement like this?”
October 1861 Oosterhuis began photographing the
excavation work for a new lock near Amsterdam. It was
the fi rst assignment of its kind in the Netherlands, soon
followed by a second in the remote province of Zeeland.
A bill of 1860 established a nationwide railway network
at public expense. To the newly emancipated group of
civil engineers it brought a whole new fi eld of activity
and a chance to distinguish themselves in prestigious
projects. These developments contribued to the deci-
sion to systematically document the construction of
public works with the aid of photography, culminating
in 1869 in a ministerial decree to make this practice
compulsory.
Between 1861 and 1884 Oosterhuis undertook
twelve large assignments commissioned by central
government departments. He found himself gazing
down on immense construction sites, where he had to
familiarize himself with a new landscape photography.
The Tijdschrift voor Photographie devoted ample space
to Oosterhuis’s Zeeland photographs in 1864 and 1865
and praised Oosterhuis’s “artistic sense.” The nature of
the industrial assignments demanded a larger format
than was customary for tourist photography. Oosterhuis
worked with a variety of cameras, ranging from a camera
for plates measuring roughly 18 × 26 cm on his fi rst
assignments, to the largest which produced images of
over 32 × 42 cm. His fellow photographers admired the
outstanding sharpness and the “wide fi eld of vision” of
these landscapes, which were taken with an orthoscopic
lens on dry collodion plates. Oosterhuis was well-known
for his immense precision, never exposing more than one
single plate for each commissioned view point.
Like all photographers of his generation Oosterhuis
was forced to diversify. He worked also on assignments
from the industry, private societies, and the Amsterdam
local authorities. At the International Photographic Ex-
hibition of 1877 in Amsterdam, where he was awarded
the Gold Municipal Medal, he submitted engineering
photographs, landscapes and cityscapes, “views and
cloud studies,” and dry plate negatives, in addition to
art reproductions in carbon print and silver print. Two
years later, no less than 64 photographs by Oosterhuis
were incorporated in the Patriotic Album, a “welcome
greeting” from the nation to Princess Emma, King
Willem III’s young bride. After this milestone in his
career, the latter years of his life were less prosperous.
Oosterhuis suffered from tuberculosis and his young-
est son Gustaaf became more active. After his father’s