These oldest Dutch photos of Japan were almost lost in a fire

The first nine photos in the exhibition are partially charred. Further on hang more charred prints. It makes a somewhat unreal impression: the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam usually only shows the most beautiful pieces from its collection, but in the exhibition Early Photos of Japan there is a lot of heritage with fire damage to see.

The reason: these are the oldest surviving photos taken by a Dutchman in that country. We know from written sources that some Dutch people have photographed in Japan before, but their work has been lost.

This almost also applied to the oeuvre of Antoon Bauduin (1820-1885), born in Dordrecht, who spent ten years in Japan. The photographs he took there and work by other photographers collected by his brother Albert were inherited more than a century later by a distant great-niece of theirs, Martine van Munster van Heuven-Sprenger van Eyk. At that time, no one in the family knew about their passion for photography: both brothers had died unmarried and childless.

Their 870 photos were stored in a chest. After the inheritance, it was stored uninspected in the attic of the house that the grandniece would move into shortly afterwards. Before that, a burglar started a fire there in 1985. Thanks to the coffin, the prints were not reduced to ashes, but a good part was damaged by the heat.

‘After the attic floor burned through, the coffin fell down. When the grandniece looked at him the next morning, he was still smoldering’, says Hans Rooseboom, curator of photography at the Rijksmuseum. “She extinguished the coffin with a bucket of water from a pond.” Then it came to light that it contained important historical recordings.

Antoon Bauduin, a military doctor, led a medical school in Nagasaki for four years from 1862 and also taught medicine himself. He then taught in Osaka and Tokyo. He photographed as a hobby. This is stated in two letters that his brother Albert sent to the Netherlands in 1865; those of Antoon have not survived.

Albert had arrived in Japan three years before Antoon and worked in Nagasaki as an agent of the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij (NHM) and as a consul. When Antoon also emigrated to Japan – a high salary would have been an important motivation – he went to live with his brother nine years younger on Deshima.

That island in Nagasaki Bay, connected to the city by a bridge, enjoys a certain fame: the Dutch were more or less imprisoned there between 1641 and 1859. The Netherlands was Japan’s only trading partner, but the residents of Deshima were only given access to the country in exceptional cases.

When Antoon moved in with his brother, Japan had only recently had to give up its relative isolation. Since then, travel restrictions for foreigners have been relaxed. The Dutch doctor, like most of his photographing contemporaries in Japan, made portraits in a studio at home, but could also go out with his large wooden camera and tripod. He shot landscapes in the area and immortalized Japanese in a way that was remarkably casual for the time.

Photography was no mean feat at the time, and certainly not in the open air. The equipment was heavy and making a recording took a lot of time. Rooseboom: ‘You made a glass plate light-sensitive by mixing chemicals and applying the mixture to it. The glass plate then had to quickly enter the camera. The exposure only took a few seconds. Then you had to develop the negative immediately, in the dark. He probably did that in a tent he took with him. The negative on the glass plate then also had to be fixed. The whole process took about half an hour for each photo.

‘Printing was also not fast: the glass plate was clamped against a previously prepared sheet of paper and sometimes put in sunlight for almost an hour. Given the effort required, it must have been a serious hobby of his.’

Unfortunately Antoon Bauduin did not write down what he recorded. It is also uncertain which photos are of him. It is certain that he was active with his camera in and around Nagasaki, but it is unclear whether he also used it elsewhere. The photos of other cities found in the coffin appear to be the work of professional photographers. In a letter Albert wrote that he had bought a ‘good number’ of Japanese cityscapes. On the back of some copies are his initials.

Several prints of 68 shots were in the box. ‘This probably concerns photos taken by Antoon,’ says Rooseboom. “It’s not likely that Albert bought multiple prints of one cityscape.” It is unknown how Antoon learned to photograph. There are no known recordings of the period before and after his stay in Japan.

In 2007 Rooseboom received a tip: the collection of the brothers, which had been on loan to a Leiden institute for a long time and was therefore known to a small circle, would be sold to the University of Nagasaki, which has absorbed the medical school that Antoon Bauduin led. . An acquaintance with the grandniece couldn’t change that.

Later, to the curator’s surprise, it turned out that the transaction had not involved all the photos: about 750 prints had gone to Japan, but after that the family had discovered 121 more. The grandniece (now 84 years old) donated it to the Rijksmuseum in 2016.

There, a complex restoration was carried out on the copies damaged by the fire. These were moistened and flattened, after which the front was consolidated with glue to prevent the charred parts from coming off. Finally, affected areas were reinforced at the back with washi, very thin Japanese paper. This all took so much time that the acquisitions can only now be shown.

One of Rooseboom’s favorites is a (also scorched) panorama of Nagasaki Bay, made up of five photos stitched together. Antoon Bauduin must have shot him from Deshima. ‘Making panoramas was common in those days. But this one is quite early and well executed.’ The series is extra valuable because the island no longer offers a view of the bay. This is partly due to a Dutch invention: a large area around it was later reclaimed and built on.