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In December 1862 the Batavian Society of Arts and
Sciences (acting on behalf of the colonial government)
drew up a contract with Van Kinsbergen. The Society did
not give any directions as to how he should photograph
the Hindu-Javanese and Buddhist antiquities. This was
left entirely to his own technical and artistic insights.
Between 1863 and 1867 Van Kinsbergen made more
than 330 photographs which were published in the
portfolio Oudheden van Java [Antiquities of Java] in
a chronological and geographical order, commencing
with the fi rst photographs he made around Bogor on
West Java and concluding with images of the Panataran
temple complex on East Java.
Van Kinsbergen showed an immense interest in the
antiquities he photographed. The Dieng Plateau was
considered one of his personal rediscoveries. However,
what he thought about the art of photography itself is not
revealed. Information on his artistic motivation can only
be gleaned by looking at the photographs themselves
and from a few responses to his work by experts that
specialized in antiquities or the East Indies. Apart from
Eduard Asser, it is not known whether fellow photogra-
phers appreciated his work as it was hardly reviewed in
photography magazines of the period.
Van Kinsbergen worked with different sized nega-
tives (now preserved in the department of history and
archaeology at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in
Jakarta) measuring 17 × 21 cm up to 30 × 40 cm. In as
far as on-site conditions allowed, he always searched for
a viewpoint that showed off the characteristic form of a
building, sculpture or artefact to its best advantage. He
often worked with images that fi lled the entire picture
in order to do justice to the detailing of the reliefs on
the richly decorated temples.
Van Kinsbergen worked deliberately with direct
sunlight enabling him to give depth and liveliness to
the sculpture he photographed. Often combined with
a pitch-black background which he obtained by scrat-
ching away the layer of emulsion on the negative, this
approach became his trademark. The highly contrasting
tone and the theatrical effect that went with it, is typical
of not only his archaeological photographs but almost
all his topographical views as well. This characteristic
makes his photographs easily distinguishable from those
Woodbury & Page made for instance. This choice of
lighting illustrates that Van Kinsbergen was not only
interested in conveying detailed information, but wanted
to bring out the dramatic, expressive powers of subjects
he photographed.
Van Kinsbergen made a near complete documenta-
tion in more than 100 photographs of Candi Panataran,
his tour de force of the Antiquities of Java series.
However, Boro-Boedoer [Borobudur] is still considered
the true pinnacle of his archaeological work. Supple-
menting the Antiquities of Java series, the Batavian
Society had commissioned Van Kinsbergen in 1873 to
photograph the Borobudur. The manner in which he
immortalized the various Buddha types on this world
famous monument enraptured the Dutch scholar G.P.
Rouffaer: “If ever the concept of God, as we see it,
has revealed itself to the Hindus in the language of
sculpture than is it certainly in these depictions of the
sitting Buddha.”
Van Kinsbergen’s assignment from the Batavian So-
ciety provided the artistic and fi nancial opportunity to
establish his reputation as a photographer with a diverse
oeuvre comprising topographical photographs, portraits,
peoples of the region, still lives and even nudes. Van
Kinsbergen tackled these photographic genres with the
same verve as the Javanese antiquities.
In his studio, the relaxed manner in which Van Kins-
bergen had his models posing reveals the communicative
skills of a theatre director. Each person or group that
appeared before his camera offered him fresh opportu-
nities to experiment with a range of poses and forms of
expression. He saw the Javanese models who visited
his studio more as objects of academic study rather
than ethnographic curiosities. His portraits of rulers
(Yogyakarta, Surakarta) also reveal how Van Kinsber-
gen tried not only to depict the symbolic function of a
sovereign, but also to make a study of the person behind
it. In 1865, he was the fi rst photographer visiting Bali,
where he made an exceptional portrait series of the
Raja of Buleleng and his court representing all ranks
of society.
In his object-oriented and monumental approach
to his subjects Van Kinsbergen was closely allied to
a photographer like Linnaeus Tripe, who worked in
India under similar circumstances. Van Kinsbergen can
be described as the only Dutch photographer working
between 1850 and 1880 who internationally measures
up to colleagues now counted among the top exponents
of nineteenth-century photography.
Isidore van Kinsbergen acquired international
acclaim with his work that was widely distributed
to international institutions. Most of it is still being
preserved in the collections of, among others, the KIT
Tropenmuseum and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam,
the National Museum of Ethnology, the Kern Institute
and the KITLV in Leiden, the Royal Archives in The
Hague, the British Library in London, the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France and the Société Asiatique in Paris.
His photographs were found in the legacy of the French
painter Paul Gauguin, being a direct source of inspira-
tion for several paintings and woodcuts. The French
collector Prince Roland Bonaparte owned hundreds of
Van Kinsbergen’s photographs now kept at the Société
de Géographie in Paris.
Saskia Asser
Gerda Theuns-de Boer