The Print Room

Photographs

In 1996, the national collections of 19th century photography, including the Hartkamp Collection and the Diepraam Collection, were added to the collections in the Print Room. The Rijksmuseum itself already had many exquisite photographs among its older possessions, such as a series of Amsterdam cityscapes by George Hendrik Breitner and a previously undiscovered photographic panorama of Baalbek by the famous French photographer Gustave le Gray.

At this time, these collections, including the photographs (the annual commissioned photographs) from the Dutch History Department and the National Photography Collection, together form a collection that is over 100,000-strong. The National Photography Collection contains work by scores of important photographers from the Netherlands, England, Germany, France and the United States. William Henry Fox Talbot, Roger Fenton, Eduard Isaac Asser, Julia Margaret Cameron, Alvin Langdon Coburn and Man Ray are just a few examples of over 5000 photographers whose work is kept. Thanks in part to funding from the Paul Huf Foundation (Paul Huf Fonds), works by Dutch and international photographers from the 19th century have been purchased regularly, and more recently from the 20th century, too. The Print Room also has hundreds of photo albums and a huge collection of photographically illustrated books from the 19th and 20th centuries. The Rijksmuseum was also the initiator of the collaborative project www.earlyphotography.nl, a digital catalogue of early photography (before 1860) from the Dutch collections.