86
such studies in the 1850s in collaboration with the
painter Eugène Delacroix. During the Second Empire,
professional photographers made large numbers of aca-
démies (academic studies of nude models) specifi cally,
if not exclusively, for artists. In England, Rejlander
likewise made academic studies to be used by artists.
Photographic composition studies for subjects such as
the Crucifi xion (Gaudenzio Marconi) and the Lamenta-
tion (Louis Bonnard) were also made, but those were
much less common than individual academies. There
are even instances in which photographs were squared
for enlargement (Jean Nicholas Truchelut). Related to
the academies were photographs reproducing ancient
and modern statuary from the Apollo Belvedere and the
Belvedere Torso to Michelangelo’s Moses and Canova’s
Hercules and Lichas. These were published by photo-
graphic establishments such as the Alinari in Florence,
Anderson in Rome, Naya in Venice and Braun in Paris.
Such photographs were acquired largely by travellers,
but they were also valuable reference works for artists.
Such photographs did not supplant plaster casts, but
they did provide alternatives to them.
Beginning with Gustave Courbet and Theodore
Rousseau in the 1850s, French painters employed
photographs as aids in their search for new forms of
realism. Édouard Manet appropriated photographs as
studies for contemporary history paintings such as the
Execution of the Emperor Maximilian. Edgar Degas and
Pierre Bonnard were themselves photographers and used
their pictures in their work as painters. Thomas Eakins
in Philadelphia made hundreds of photographs of his
pupils and drew on these studies for major paintings
such as The Swimming Hole. In Berlin in the 1890s
Edvard Munch was infl uenced by the photographs of
August Strindberg. At the turn of the century in Paris,
Pablo Picasso made extensive use of ethnographic pho-
tographs for paintings leading up to and including the
Demoiselles d’Avignon.
Graham Smith
See Also: Rejlander, Oscar Gustav; Cameron, Julia
Margaret; Hawarden, Viscountess Clementina
Elphinstone; Hill, David Octavius, and Robert
Adamson; Ruskin, John; Durieu, Jean-Louis-Marie-
Eugène; Delacroix, Ferdinand Victor Eugène;
Marconi, Gaudenzio; Alinari, Fratelli; Anderson,
James; Naya, Carlo; Braun, Adolphe; Courbet,
Gustave; Degas, Edgar; Bonnard, Pierre; and Eakins,
Thomas.
Further Reading
Dodier, Virginia, Lady Hawarden: Studies from Life 1857–1864,
New York, 1999.
Miller, Hugh, “The Calotype,” History of Photography 22:1 (Spring
2003), 7–12, reprinted from The Witness 12 July 1843.
Stevenson, Sara, The Personal Art of David Octavius Hill, New
Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002.
Sylvia Woolf, with contributions by Stephanie Lipscomb, Debra
N. Mancoff and Phyllis Rose, Julia Margaret Cameron’s
Women, New Haven and London, 1998.ASSER, EDUARD ISAAC (1809–1894)
Dutch photographer and advocate
Eduard Isaac Asser was one of the fi rst representatives
of early photography in the Netherlands. An advocate
by profession and bred in one of the most prominent
Amsterdam Jewish families of jurists and lawyers he
experimented with photography at a very early stage.
Eduard Isaac Asser and his sister Netje Asser were
already known to the Dutch public because of their
enchanting childhood memories of life in Amsterdam
just after the Napoleonic period, written between 1814
and 1833, and published in 1964. In 1994 the Asser
Family Foundation bequeathed the photographic legacy
of Eduard Isaac to the State of the Netherlands. The
photographs are now held in the Print Room of the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. These incunabula consist
of four albums compiled by the photographer himself
with c. 200 examples of early calotype photography (c.
1845), actually the earliest known photographs of Am-
sterdam, and from the beginning of the 1850s on until
1857 wet collodion photography. There is a group of 20
daguerreotypes from the 1840s, as well as proof prints of
photolithography which he made in the late 1850s. Asser
was active as an amateur artist as well. He received les-
sons from the Amsterdam painter Jan Adam Kruseman
(1804–1862) and regularly sent his paintings to the so
called Exhibitions of the Works of Living Artists. As all
young men from well-to-do circles Eduard Isaac owned
a large collection of scientifi c instruments.
It is presumed Asser bought his equipment and plates
around 1842 in Paris, where the Fould family lived,
they were related to his wife who descended from the
Cologne banking family Oppenheim. From that moment
on Asser learned to make the laborious daguerreotypes,
mainly portraits of the members of his family. The fi rst
examples of paper photography date from 1845: small
paper negatives with views from his house on the canal
het Singel, which we can date fairly exactly. He also used
this same process for portraits done around 1846–1847.
Particularly of interest is a set of self-portraits starting on
the title page of the fi rst album, written in French, from
which we can draw the conclusion that he somehow
started this album as a photographic autobiographical
notebook. The self-portrait on the title page is followed
by others stating his various moods—‘a morbid state’
explains one of the adjoining written remarks. During
his short career as an amateur photographer Asser kept
making self-portraits of which especially the ones done