Some of you BPH members may have already come across this site, but nevertheless, a useful resource for those who haven't.
This national 'on line' catalogue contains art-historical information on the earliest photographs owned by the Rijksmuseum (Rijksprentenkabinet) in Amsterdam, the Print Room of the University of Leiden and 25 other museums, archives and libraries in the Netherlands. The catalogue encompasses more than 3,700 portraits, city views and landscapes from the pioneering period 1839 -1860. These photographs were taken in the Netherlands, France, England, Germany and the United States by both Dutch and foreign photographers. Famous images by photographers such as William Henry Fox Talbot, Edouard Baldus and Gustave Le Gray are found along with the earliest photographs of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Haarlem. Every technique is represented, from daguerreotypes to salted paper prints, glass negatives, paper negatives and photolithographs. The various uses of photographs are also presented; photographs in a case or in a frame; photographs pasted in books or albums; and stereographs. The catalogue contains a wonderful cross-section of photographic production from the pioneering period.
More than 2100 photographs are from the National Photograph Collection in the Rijksprentenkabinet in the Rijksmuseum, which has actively collected international and Dutch photographs since 1996. The Leiden Print Room and Study Center for Photography , which administers the oldest public photograph collection in the Netherlands, owns almost 900 photographs from before 1860.
The information and the available visual material is presented in an `online' collection catalogue which can be found on this link here.
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