87
against a dark ground are intriguing. Asser is seen in a
crumpled jacket with the black stains of the chemicals
on his fi ngers sitting on the kitchen chair contemplat-
ing, the next moment probably running on to one of his
many meetings in the as many distinguished councils
he formed part of.
Self-portraits, portraits (groups and double portraits),
still lifes and views of the city of Amsterdam were to be
the main subjects of his oeuvre which is very similar to
that of the British and French amateur photographers
from the early period. They all made portraits of their
wives and children or compositions with glasses, vases
and small statuettes close to hand. Asser photographed
from the window of his house, the obvious experiment
with a new medium. A special category are his still
lifes of photographic paraphernalia: a lens, a camera,
a statuette, a stereoscope, a portfolio of photographic
paper and a copy of the Revue Photographique. With
the self-portraits they show his contemplating over the
form and content of images done in a new medium of
which the canon wasn’t at all established yet.
Asser worked together with Marie Eugène Bour
(1814–after 1884) a Frenchman and the managing direc-
tor of the garancine factory in Amsterdam, a chemical
factory which produced the red paint for the uniforms of
the French army. It is very probable that at the beginning
of the 1850s they experimented with glass negatives
and new emulsions. In 1855 they submitted their pho-
tographs to the International Exhibition of Photography
in Amsterdam where the Dutch public surely got a treat.
There the Asser and Bour photographs were for the fi rst
and last time seen in public, and hung next to the works
done by many distinguished photographers, among them
Edouard Baldus, Charles Marville and Charles Nègre.
From 1857 on Asser experimented with photolithog-
raphy and submitted his results of transferring photo-
graphs to the lithographic stone to the contest written
out by the Duc de Luynes in France. He didn’t come
very far and the prize was eventually won by Alphonse
Poitevin. Later Asser sold the patent for his process to
the Bruxelles fi rm Simonau & Toovey who used it for
various publications. In the Netherlands this process
was now and then applied for a small group of users.
For instance collectors of old prints obtained facsimile
photolithographs of scarce material. Throughout his life
Asser kept working with his own invention, supporting
print fi rms in Amsterdam and printing from the stone
himself.
During his long life that lasted nearly the whole of the
19th century Asser not only was a curious spectator at
the discovery of photography. He lived through many a
decisive development in the history of photography and
photomechanical printing throughout the second half of
the 19th century. But and that is even more interesting
he also knew the world of arts and visual culture of the
pre-photographic period. When in 1830 he visited his
grandparents in Berlin he brought with him as a gift
drawn portraits of the members of his family and he
bought lots of lithographs of the interesting sites in
the Prussian capital. Twenty years later it surely would
have been his own photographic prints and instead of
lithographs photographs of streets, monuments and
places! In Berlin he also visited the sculptor Christian
Rauch and bought a collection of plaster casts which he
fi rst draught and later used in photography as well. He
followed lectures by Friedrich Hegel, and in Weimar
caught a glimpse of the writer and philosopher Goethe
whose likenesses he knew from the prints at home. Thus
he gives us many clues as to how form and function
of the new medium of photography was fi rmly rooted
in the art practices of the pre-photographic world. In
his albums we see photography naturally—and gradu-
ally—develop from it.Mattie BoomBiography
Eduard Isaac Asser was born on 19 October1809 in
Amsterdam. He studied law in Leiden and became an
advocate in the law fi rm of his father in Amsterdam. In
1850 he became the fi rst Jewish member of the Provin-
cial Assembly of the States of North Holland and held
a number of public functions. He was an amateur artist
and took up photography in the early1840s. He became
a member of the Société Française de Photographie
in 1854. Asser was active as a photographer between
1842 and 1857, when he put away his cameras for good.
From that moment on until the end of his life in 1894
he found a new pastime in photolithography. In 1860
he sold his photolithography process to the Simonau
& Toovey printing fi rm in Brussels. In the Netherlands
this process of photomechanical printing was occasion-
nally applied to map making in the army and for book
illustration. In 1892 he was the founder of a printing
house Maatschappij voor Photolitho- and Zincogra-
phie. On 21 september1894 he died in Amsterdam at
the age of eighty fi ve. His photographic legacy stayed
in the Asser family for a hundred years. In 1994 it was
bequeathed to the State of the Netherlands and added
to the National Photo Collection in the Print Room of
the Rijksmuseum.
See Also: Daguerreotype; Wet Collodion Negative;
Self-Portraiture; Baldus, Édouard; Marville, Charles;
Nègre, Charles; and Poitevin, Alphonse Louis.Further Reading
Boom, Mattie and Jan Coppens, ‘Eduard Isaac Asser,’ in I. Th.
Leijerzapf (ed.), Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse fotografi e