Painter & early street photographer. The astonishing early street photography that helped George Hendrik Breitner add social realism to his famous paintings of Amsterdam.

Snow scene over the Damrak in Amsterdam, George Hendrik Breitner, c. 1890 – c. 1910.

For the Dutch painter George Hendrik Breitner (1857-1923), his interest in photography began as a practical way to capture street life in all its spontaneous authenticity a for use as reference in painting the city and other subject matter. Preserving the fleeting atmospherics of the weather was something he was after too. Inclement, atmospheric weather especially was something he was aiming to capture. Brietner is noted especially for his realistic, renderings of the city streets and harbours. Photography enhanced and accentuated that reality. If you ask ten photographers to shoot the same street, the results will be ten sets of images of ten different streets. There are so many factors involved that everyone can’t help but have a personal style and of course Brietner was no different. Once you know this, and have seen the particular way he chooses his camera angles, his compositions, the instinctive and the particular way he chooses to crop moving passers by, to shoot from low, etc., etc. – it is truly difficult not to recognise, see (and feel) his quite distinctive photographic sensibilities in his paintings.

*Self portrait with pince-nez,*
George Hendrik Breitner, 1881

Breitner’s view of himself as ‘le peintre du peuple’ (the people’s painter) meant that his street photography was all about everyday Amsterdam & Amsterdammers. Impressionism (& social realism) owes just a little of its revolutionary immediacy to the magic of the camera.

A huge part of Breitner’s legacy – aside from that girl in a kimono – is that he introduced radical new levels of social realism into contemporary imagery of the Netherlands. Of course, Breitner’s camera wasn’t his only tool he clearly had an armoury. One quick flick through his sketchbooks reveals an eye and a hand that lacked nothing artistically. Photography simply helped.

The Singel Bridge at the Paleisstraat in Amsterdam, George Hendrik Breitner, 1898. Oil on canvas.

Several photographic reference studies are known for Breitner’s Singelbrug near the Paleisstraat in Amsterdam, ca. 1897 (above). It’s an image that could easily (if you squint at it quickly through your eyelashes) have been snapped on an iphone in Amsterdam yesterday.

W. Langdon Kihn (1898-1957). An artist “whose interests in the Indian is not in so much that of beauty as that of truth”.

Art & Design Travel

Enough about paintings. Brietner had an incredible eye and he walked around Amsterdam in the late 1800s with a camera and took a some amazing pictures for us to enjoy right now.

Helene Schjerfbeck began as a precociously skilled, slightly melancholic late-19th-century academic realist. She finished as a painter whose sublime abstract images are an exquisite harmony of pure paint and cryptic description.

“I have to draw to the point of madness, just draw. Just work, work and think of nothing else”, said the brilliant Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. It did him no good, he was just another “degenerate” artist to the Nazis.

From hat shop girl to Dutch art icon. But who was the Girl in the Kimono? The opaque story of an 1890s working class teenager immortalised by George Hendrik Breitner.

Descendant of samurai and relentless entrepreneur, Ogawa Kazumasa opened Tokyo’s first photo studio, shot Japan’s art treasures, the 100 prettiest geisha in Tokyo and taught photography to the military. His legacy is these exquisite images of flowers.

L’Estampe Moderne; the 1890s Parisian Art Nouveau “best of” album feat. various international artists. 4 lithographs every month. Just 3₣r 50c an issue.

It’s easy to see how, in the mid 1800s, Paul Gustave Doré “hypnotized the widest public ever captured by a major illustrator”. Even Van Gogh was a fan, he copied Doré shortly before shooting himself.

In the 1890s the Dutch painter, George Hendrik Breitner took nude reference photos for his paintings. In the 1990s they were found.

Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach. 1880s free love messiah, naturist, pacifist, vegetarian, sun worshipper and unique symbolist painter.

Found photos : Three lost decades of Iowa Speedway recovered. With Merlin Benning, Lester “Red” Dralle. Claus Stricker, Don & Dick Feckers & Red Droste. 1950>1970.

The Art of Protest: Albert Hahn was righteous anger manifest. A graphic character assassin that even the mighty Germany Kaiser feared.

It’s 1914. and Orientalism meets Art Nouveau and the early stirrings of Art Deco in Emile-Allain Séguy’s “Samarkande: 20 Compositions en couleurs dans le Style oriental”.

The 1920s French Art Deco influencer who drew pure design inspiration from the natural world. Insectes (1929) by Émile-Allain Séguy.

The forgotten Finska Vyer birch bark album, by I.K Inha, 1892. Inside are raw natural landscape photographs of Finland. It won the 1st international photographic competion in Paris.

William Morris. Strawberry Thief . “You can picture my Father going out in the early morning and watching the rascally thrushes at work on the fruit beds…”

The Swiss artist, Ernst Kreidolf (1863-1956). A Princess helped him give up the life of a farmer to put his faith and future in the hands of the flower fairies. He lived magically ever after.

Dope fiends busted. 1950s narcotics crime photography from the archives of L.A. Enquirer.

John Martin’s sister was murdered by a neighbour, one brother was a “perfectly cracked” eccentric philosopher/inventor & the other an insane religious firestarter. Perhaps it’s no surprise John became the ultimate harbinger of The Apocolypse.

Outraged. The 1896 murder of Helen Thomson. Markinch, Fife, Scotland.

Achille Lemot learns the exact price of a mistress in 1870s Paris.

Erland Soderburg. A 1907 matricide. “Then I grabbed a small kitchen knife that was lying on the table. I hacked at her throat, then slashed it and the blood spurted out on me.”

Children of the Runestones. 300 A.D. Sweden.

The Dutch ocean liner Hooft, plagued by rats, burned three times and cursed by a French shipyard that lost 3 ocean liners to fire between 1930-1933.

1800s India. A mystery blue-eyed, pale skinned redhead is painted alongside those of 28 Mughal royals. An anonymous court artist evokes how richly the Indian “1%” lived, in these exquisite and rarely seen paintings.

Found. 3 Untitled works (1974). By an unknown artist working in a daylight atelier in Budapest.

8 mystery photographs from 1908/1910. From within some kind of medical institution or sanitorium somewhere in Eastern Europe. There’s one small clue: The Trendelenburg Position. Maybe.