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‘Impressionist’ characteristics of soft focus, restricted
tonal range, and manipulative technique persisted in
pictorialism, and in twentieth century processes such
as bromoil and three-colour Fresson printing and com-
mercially manufactured imitations of non-standard
papers. Impressionism has been accused of being an
ill-conceived imitation of painting, untrue to the essence
of photography. Yet its diffused and expressive effects
looked ahead to abstraction, and those most dismissive
of the aesthetic championed a modernist photography
that prioritised an objective vision—to see things as
they are, without conventionalism—the very ethos of
naturalism and impressionism.
Hope Kingsley
See also: Davison, George; Zola, Émile; Emerson,
Peter Henry; Landscape; Genre; Keighley, Alexander;
Brotherhood of the Linked Ring; Brothers, Alfred;
Naturalistic Photography; Photographic Exchange
Club and Photographic Society Club, London; Dry
Plate Negatives: Gelatine; Dry Plate Negatives: Non-
Gelatine, Including Dry Collodion; Art Photography
and Aesthetics; Carbon Print; Puyo, Émile Joachim
Constant; Käsebier, Gertrude; Platinum Print; Gum
Print; Hollyer, Frederick; Evans, Frederick H.; Degas,
Edgar; Snapshot Photography; Night Photography;
Stereoscopy; Coburn, Alvin Langdon; Hofmeister,
Theodor and Oskar; Kühn, Heinrich; Pictorialism;
Fresson and family, Théodore-Henri; and Bromide
Print.
Further Reading
Balfour, Graham, “Art and Photography,” Amateur Photographer,
vol. 7, no. 172 (1888).
Bate, Francis, The Naturalistic School of Painting, London:
The Artist, 1887. Published in an earlier version as seven
articles in The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, vol. 7,
nos. 75–82 (1886).
Brothers, Alfred, Photography: Its History, Processes, Appa-
ratus, and Materials. A Practical Manual, London: Charles
Griffi n, 1892.
Chesneau, Ernest, The Education of the Artist, translated from
the French by Clara Bell, London: Cassell, 1886.
Davison, George, “Impressionism in Photography,” British Jour-
nal of Photography, vol. 37, no. 1599 (1890). Also published
in the Photographic News, vol. 34, nos. 1685 and 1686, and
vol. 35, no. 1687 (1890 and 1891), and The Artist, vol. 12,
no. 135 (1891).
Daily Telegraph review of 1889 Photographic Society exhibition,
reprinted in the British Journal of Photography, vol. 36, no.
1535 (1889), 654.
Degas, letter [1872] in John House, Monet: Nature into Art, New
Haven: Yale University, 1986.
Emerson, Peter Henry, Naturalistic Photography for Students of
the Art, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, Rivington,
1889.
von Falke, James, “The Photographic Exhibition at the Austrian
Museum,” Photography, vol. 3, no. 136, 1891.
Matthies-Masuren, Fritz, “Sezession,” Foreword to the Catalogue
of the International Elite Exhibition of Artistic Photography,
Munich, 1898. Quoted in Naef, Weston J., The Collection of
Alfred Stieglitz: Fifty Pioneers of Modern Photography, New
York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Viking, 1978.
Muther, Richard, “The Japanese,” The History of Modern Paint-
ing, vol. 2, London: Henry, 1896.
The New Painting: Impressionism 1874–1886, ed. Charles S. Mof-
fett, exhibition catalogue, San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums
of San Francisco, 1986.
White, Gleeson, editorial, “Is the Camera the Friend or Foe of
Art?,” The Studio, vol. 1, no. 3, 1893.
INDONESIA (NETHERLANDS, EAST
INDIES)
The colonial government in the Netherlands East In-
dies, now the Republic of Indonesia, quickly saw how
photography could be employed to record Javanese
antiquities and natural history. Only a year after Louis-
Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s (1787–1851) invention had
been announced in France in August 1839, the Dutch
Ministry of Colonies commissioned Jurriaan Munnich
(1817–1865), a medical offi cer to travel to Java to “test
and employ photography in our tropical regions” and
to collect photographic representations of the “principle
views, etc. and also of plants and other natural objects.”
He was the fi rst known daguerreotypist to have worked
in the country. Largely due to technical diffi culties,
compounded by the climate, the 64 photographs he took
were not very satisfactory; even his most successful
image had an exposure time of 26 minutes.
In 1843 the Dutch government accepted a request
from Adolph Schaefer, a German-born Daguerreotypist
then working in The Hague, for permission to travel to
the Netherlands East Indies in return for photographic
work. Schaefer arrived there in June 1844 and fi rst
worked in Buitenzorg (now Bonger). In September
1844 he established what was probably the fi rst portrait
studio in the colony in the capital Batavia (Jakarta).
Besides portraits he also made copies of paintings,
etc. Evaluating the new technique, the Dutch-language
newspaper the Javasche Courant (22 February 1845)
stated: ‘Those who like to be fl attered should never long
for a daguerreotype portrait; here there is no fl attery,
it is a mirror that refl ects back both the imperfections
and the beauties.’ In April 1845 Schaefer was ordered
to make Daguerreotypes of some of the collections of
the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences in Batavia
and later in the same year he was sent to Central Java to
make Daguerreotypes of the bas-reliefs of the Borobu-
dur temple. He produced at least 58 successful images,
many of which have survived. He later worked as an
independent photographer in Semarang.
While the 1840s were dominated by government
sponsorship of photography, in the 1850s the growing
popularity of studio portraits created a market for a larg-
INDONESIA
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