JAVANESE PORTRAITS AND COURSE SCENES, Java, early 1860s
Folio, bound in dark red basane with, on the first plate, in gilt letters:
"JAVA - Eduard Cassalette" (local binding), handwritten index and 72 albumen prints, numbered in pencil, mounted one by one for the larger ones or by four or five for the cdv formats on the rectos, numerous wet spots. Humidity has affected all the prints, most of them with some severity.
These prints are from the first period of work by the island's first photographer, the European Isidore Van Kinsbergen. Isidore was born in 1821 in Bruges in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, nine years before the creation of Belgium, his father was from Amsterdam. He arrived in Batavia as the leader of a troupe that founded the French Theatre of Batavia, and the settings of his paintings are influenced by his life as a young man in the heart of theatres.
None of the prints are signed, comparable and slightly later portraits from the same collodion negatives can be found in a few referenced albums, Leiden University, Syracuse University (New York), Musée du
Quai Branly.
Note the impressive tropical still life inspired by the work of the Flemish painters that opens the album. Portraits taken at the court of the Sultan of Yogyakarta, the Susuhunan (emperor)
of Surakarta (Solo) and the regent of Bandung, as well as in Madura and Buleleng (east of
of Bali).
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