Napoleon in Venlo (12 september 1804)

In het jaar dat Napoleon zich tot Keizer liet kronen, bracht hij in september een inspectie-bezoek aan de Vesting Venlo. Aan de hand van Keuller's verslag kan zijn route te paard door en om Venlo heen worden gereconstrueerd. Buiten beeld is hij al van zijn met 8 paarden bespannen wagen ter hoogte van de Loeseijkerweg overgestapt op zijn paard. Op de fraaie kaart die Albert Kiefer heeft vervaardigd (op basis van een kaart op A1 formaat als bijlage in de Historische stedenatlas van Nederland - Venlo), komt Napoleon aan de zuidoostkant van Venlo in beeld.

© Albert Kiefer

©1999 Historische stedenatlas van Nederland - Venlo

ISBN 90-407-1992-6

 

Uit: Geschiedenis en Beschrijving van Venloo, L.J.E.Keuller, 1843

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Frankrijk was intusschen tijd het toneel van gewigtige gebeurtenissen geweest. De Nationale Conventie was, den 5 Brumaire jaar IV (27 October 1795), vervangen door het, uit vijf leden bestaande Directorium, hetwelk op zijne beurt, den 18 Brumaire jaar VIII (9 November 1799), werd opgeheven, toen Sieijs, Roger-Ducos en Bonaparte, door den Raad der Ouderlingen, tot provisioneele Consuls der Republiek werden benoemd. Eene maand later, bij de constitutie van den 22 Frimaire (13 December), werd Bonaparte tot eersten, Cambacérès tot tweeden, en Lebrun tot derden Consul aangesteld. Maar de eerste plaats in een gemeenebest kon eenen nieuwen Cesar niet voldoen: de eerste Consul Napoleon Bonaparte werd, den 28 Floréal jaar XII (18 Mei 1804), uitgeroepen als Keizer der Franschen onder den naam van Napoleon I, en de erfelijkheid des troons werd in zijne familie vastgelegd.

Ettelijke maanden daarna, toen Napoleon uit het kamp van Boulogne naar Aken gereisd was, ging hij van daar naar Crefeld en verders naar Venloo, hetwelk hem, den 12 September, binnen zijne muren ontving. De Keizer, ingehaald door eene Eerewacht te paard, kwam, in zijnen wagen gezeten, langs den ouden weg van Straelen, steeg te paard aan de Loeseijkerweg, en reed, ten einde de Gelderse poort, welke door haren bouwvalligen staat niet al te veilig geacht werd, te vermijden, over de kruin des bergs [1], zelfs door boomen en struikhout henen, om des te beter de ligging der vesting te kunnen betrachten. Omstreeks tien uren vóórmiddag in het Zand aan den voet der glacis [2] gekomen, werd Zijne Majesteit ontvangen door de civiele Authoriteiten en eene Eerewacht te voet, en daar werden hem door den Heer Maire Van den Vaero de sleutels der stad aangeboden. De poort [3] inkomende, wendde Napoleon zijn paard eensklaps links [4], waarschijnlijk om zich aan de ontelbare menigte die hem opwachtte, te onttrekken, sloeg het enge straatje, genaamd de Floddergats [5] (welk daarna den pompeuzen naam van Keizerstraat bekwam) in, en rigtte zich, alleen gevolgd door den kommanderenden Officier der Genie, naar het klooster Maria weide [6], alwaar zijn gevolg, waaronder men ‘s Keizers schoonzoon Eugène Beauharnais, later Onderkoning van Italië, den Maarschalk Lannes, Hertog van Montebello, en verscheidene Generaals telde, weder bij hem kwamen. Na den hoofdwal [7] rondgereden te hebben, ging de Keizer de buitenwerken inspecteren, en aan het onderste einde van den Maaswaard [8] gekomen zijnde, zou hij aldaar, indien men hem niet tegengehouden hadde, door den mond der haven, waar meer dan zes voet water stond, gereden zijn. Een bootje [9], waarin hij zich toen met den Kommandant der Genie begaf, bragt hem, op zijn bevel, aan de overzijde der rivier, en een oogenblik daarna, zag men hem wederom te paard over de batterijen van het fort St. Michiel [10] galoperen. Aan deze zijde teruggekeerd, begaf hij zich langs de Maas, rijdende aan den Broesert [11] door het water, dat uit de grachten aldaar in de rivier uitloopt, naar de forten Ginkel [12] en Beerendonk [13], en kwam eindelijk in de stad terug, vergezeld van dezulken, welke hem op dezen schielijken togt waren bijgebleven. Na zich nog een paar uren te hebben opgehouden, klom de Keizer in zijnen wagen, met acht paarden bespannen, en door een sterk detachement der keizerlijken garde begeleid, verliet hij de stad, zich begevende naar het Huis Haag bij Gelder [14], ten einde daar te overnachten en den volgenden dag zijne reis over Meins naar Parijs te vervolgen. Beauharnais, Lannes, met alle Staf-Officieren van ‘s Keizers gevolg, vertrokken eerst den anderen daags, en begaven zich naar Crefeld.

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Book: "Pre-modern Japan in Colorful Images"

In January 2025 I published this book in US letter format. By the format of the book and the large amount of colored pages, it is unfortunately not very cheap.

Below are the introductory pages and a few images of these three master photographers of 19th Century Japan: Felice Beato, Baron Raimond Stillfried von Rathenitz and Kusakabe Kimbei. In the book you will find more than 450 images, almost 1:1 in size to the original, always a single image on every page:

- Felice Beato: 101 photo's

- Baron Raimond Stillfried von Rathenitz: 146 photo's

- Kusakabe Kimbei: 212 photo's

Order via Lulu.com

Introduction

Pre-Modern Photography in Japan: A Journey Through Time

Photography in Japan has a rich and fascinating history that dates back to the mid-19th century. The introduction of photography to Japan coincided with the end of the Edo period and the beginning of the Meiji era, a time of significant transformation and modernization in the country.

The first known photograph taken in Japan was captured in 1857 by the Dutch photographer J. L. C. Pompe van Meerdervoort. He was a physician and a member of the Dutch naval mission to Japan. This photograph marked the beginning of a new era in Japanese visual culture. The introduction of photography was closely linked to Japan’s opening to the West after centuries of isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate.

The Meiji Era and the Spread of Photography

During the Meiji era (1868-1912), Japan underwent rapid modernization and industrialization. Photography played a crucial role in documenting these changes. The government recognized the importance of this new medium and supported its development. Photographers like Shimooka Renjō and Uchida Kuichi became prominent figures during this period. Shimooka Renjō, one of Japan’s first professional photographers, opened a studio in Yokohama in 1862. He was known for his portraits and landscapes, capturing the essence of a rapidly changing Japan. Uchida Kuichi, another pioneering photographer, was the first to photograph Emperor Meiji, providing a visual record of the imperial family that was previously unseen by the public.

The Role of Foreign Photographers

Foreign photographers also played a significant role in the development of photography in Japan. Felice Beato, an Italian-British photographer, arrived in Japan in 1863 and became one of the most influential photographers of the time. Beato’s work included portraits, landscapes, and scenes of everyday life, providing a comprehensive visual record of Japan during the early Meiji period.

Beato’s photographs were not only artistic but also served as valuable historical documents. His images of the aftermath of the Boshin War (1868-1869), a civil war that led to the establishment of the Meiji government, are some of the earliest examples of war photography.

The Evolution of Photographic Techniques

The early photographers in Japan used various techniques, including daguerreotypes, albumen prints, and collodion processes. These methods required long exposure times and meticulous preparation, making the practice of photography both an art and a science.

One notable development was the hand-coloring of photographs. Japanese photographers and artists were skilled in this technique, which involved adding color to black-and-white photographs using watercolors or dyes. This practice became particularly popular for portraits and scenic views, adding a unique and vibrant dimension to the images.

Photography and Cultural Exchange

Photography also facilitated cultural exchange between Japan and the West. Western photographers introduced new techniques and styles, while Japanese photographers adapted these methods to suit their own artistic sensibilities. This exchange led to a unique blend of Western and Japanese aesthetics in photography.

The work of photographers like Kusakabe Kimbei exemplifies this fusion. Kimbei, who worked as an assistant to Felice Beato, later established his own studio and became known for his hand-colored photographs of Japanese landscapes and people. His images were highly sought after by foreign visitors and collectors, contributing to the global appreciation of Japanese photography.

Conclusion

Pre-modern photography in Japan was a period of experimentation, adaptation, and cultural exchange. It laid the foundation for the rich photographic tradition that continues to thrive in Japan today. The early photographers, both Japanese and foreign, captured a transformative era in Japanese history, providing us with invaluable visual records of a nation in transition.

From the first photograph taken by Pompe van Meerdervoort to the hand-colored masterpieces of Kusakabe Kimbei, the journey of pre-modern photography in Japan is a testament to the enduring power of this medium to document, preserve, and celebrate the human experience.

Felice Beato

(ca. 1832/1834 Venice, Italy or Corfu, Greece – 29 January 1909 Florence, Italy)

Felice Beato, also known as Felix Beato, was an Italian–British photographer. He was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of the architecture and landscapes of Asia and the Mediterranean region. Beato's travels gave him the opportunity to create images of countries, people, and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe and North America. His work provides images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War, and represents the first substantial body of photojournalism. He influenced other photographers, and his influence in Japan, where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, was particularly deep and lasting. 9 A death certificate discovered in 2009 states that Beato was born in Venice in 1832 and shows that he died on 29 January 1909 in Florence. The death certificate also indicates that he was a British subject and a bachelor. It is likely that early in his life Beato and his family moved to Corfu, at the time part of the British protectorate of the Ionian Islands, and so Beato was a British subject.

Because of the existence of a number of photographs signed "Felice Antonio Beato" and "Felice A. Beato", it was long assumed that there was one photographer who somehow photographed at the same time in places as distant as Egypt and Japan. In 1983 it was shown by Chantal Edel that "Felice Antonio Beato" represented two brothers, Felice Beato and Antonio Beato, who sometimes worked together, sharing a signature. The confusion arising from the signatures continues to cause problems in identifying which of the two photographers was the creator of a given image.

By 1863 Beato had moved to Yokohama, Japan, joining Charles Wirgman, with whom he had travelled from Bombay to Hong Kong. The two formed and maintained a partnership called "Beato & Wirgman, Artists and Photographers" during the years 1864–1867, one of the earliest and most important commercial studios in Japan. Wirgman again produced illustrations derived from Beato's photographs, while Beato photographed some of Wirgman's sketches and other works. (Beato's photographs were also used for engravings within Aimé Humbert's Le Japon illustré and other works.) Beato's Japanese photographs include portraits, genre works, landscapes, cityscapes, and a series of photographs documenting the scenery and sites along the Tōkaidō Road, the latter series recalling the ukiyo-e of Hiroshige and Hokusai. During this period, foreign access to (and within) the country was greatly restricted by the Tokugawa shogunate. Accompanying ambassadorial delegations and taking any other opportunities created by his personal popularity and close relationship with the British military, Beato reached areas of Japan where few westerners had ventured, and in addition to conventionally pleasing subjects sought sensational and macabre subject matter such as heads on display after decapitation. His images are remarkable not only for their quality but also for their rarity as photographic views of Edo period Japan.

The greater part of Beato's work in Japan contrasted strongly with his earlier work in India and China, which "had underlined and even celebrated conflict and the triumph of British imperial might". Aside from the Portrait of Prince Kung, any appearances of Chinese people in Beato's earlier work had been peripheral (minor, blurred, or both) or as corpses. With the exception of his work in September 1864 as an official photographer on the British military expedition to Shimonoseki, Beato was eager to portray Japanese people, and did so uncondescending, even showing them as defiant in the face of the elevated status of westerners.

Beato was very active while in Japan. In 1865 he produced a number of dated views of Nagasaki and its surroundings. From 1866 he was often caricatured in Japan Punch, which was founded and edited by Wirgman. In an October 1866 fire that destroyed much of Yokohama, Beato lost his studio and many, perhaps all, of his negatives.

While Beato was the first photographer in Japan to sell albums of his works, he quickly recognized their full commercial potential. By around 1870 their sale had become the mainstay of his business. Although the customer would select the content of earlier albums, Beato moved towards albums of his own selection. It was probably Beato who introduced to photography in Japan the double concept of views and costumes/manners, an approach common in photography of the Mediterranean. By 1868 Beato had readied two volumes of photographs, "Native Types", containing 100 portraits and genre works, and "Views of Japan", containing 98 landscapes and cityscapes.

Many of the photographs in Beato's albums were hand colored, a technique that in his studio successfully applied the refined skills of Japanese water colorists and woodblock printmakers to European photography.

From about the time of the ending of his partnership with Wirgman in 1869, Beato attempted to retire from the work of a photographer, instead, attempting other ventures and delegating photographic work to others within his own studio in Yokohama, "F. Beato & Co., Photographers", which he ran with an assistant named H. Woollett and four Japanese photographers and four Japanese artists. Kusakabe Kimbei was probably one of Beato's artist-assistants before becoming a photographer in his own right. These other ventures failed, but Beato's photographic skills and personal popularity ensured that he could successfully return to work as a photographer. Beato photographed with Ueno Hikoma, and possibly taught photography to Raimund von Stillfried.

In 1871 Beato served as official photographer with the United States naval expedition of Admiral Rodgers to Korea. Although it is possible that an unidentified Frenchman photographed Korea during the 1866 invasion of Ganghwa Island, Beato's photographs are the earliest of Korea whose provenance is clear.

Beato's business ventures in Japan were numerous. He owned land and several studios, was a property consultant, had a financial interest in the Grand Hotel of Yokohama, and was a dealer in imported carpets and women's bags, among other things. He also appeared in court on several occasions, variously as plaintiff, defendant, and witness. On 6 August 1873 Beato was appointed Consul General for Greece in Japan.

In 1877 Beato sold most of his stock to the firm Stillfried & Andersen, who then moved into his studio. In turn, Stillfried & Andersen sold the stock to Adolfo Farsari in 1885. Following the sale to Stillfried & Andersen, Beato apparently retired for some years from photography, concentrating on his parallel career as a financial speculator and trader. On 29 November 1884 he left Japan, ultimately landing in Port Said, Egypt. It was reported in a Japanese newspaper that he had lost all his money on the Yokohama silver exchange.

Barbers	Fishmonger	Three Women Grooming	Spear-men Lancers	The Executioner	THe Golden Pavilion

Baron Raimond Stillfried von Rathenitz

(6 August 1839 Komotau, Bohemia – 12 August 1911 Vienna, Austrian-Hungarian Empire)

Raimund Stillfried was an Austrian military officer and early professional photographer in Japan. His historical photographs of Japan following the end of the Tokugawa shogunate in the 1870s have been appreciated for their documentary and artistic value and collected in international archives.

He was the son of Baron (Freiherr) August Wilhelm Stillfried von Rathenitz (1806-1897) and Countess Maria Anna Johanna Theresia Walburge Clam-Martinitz (1802–1874). During his training at the Imperial Marine Academy, he also studied painting. After leaving his military career, Stillfried traveled to South America and China, and on to Yokohama, Japan, in 1864. In 1871, he opened a photographic studio called Stillfried & Co., which operated until 1875. The same year, Stillfried formed a partnership with Hermann Andersen and the studio was renamed, Stillfried & Andersen (also known as the Japan Photographic Association). This studio operated until 1885. In 1877, Stillfried & Andersen had bought the studio and stock of Felice Beato, for whom he had worked at the beginning of his career. During a trip overseas in the late 1870s, Stillfried also visited and photographed in Dalmatia, Bosnia, and Greece.

Similar to Felice Beato, Stillfried was one of the leading photographers in Japan during the 1870s. He is known for his portrait photography and, like Felice Beato, also made numerous genre and landscape photographs. Such images, which showed carefully staged genre scenes with people from foreign cultures as well as pictures of trips to regions and sights formerly unknown outside of Japan, were popular souvenirs for foreign residents or visitors. These images, often produced in high numbers and as hand-coloured albumen prints, have become rare and valuable over time.

For the 1873 Vienna World Exposition, the government of Japan commissioned Stillfried to travel to Hokkaido, where he took photographs documenting the process of the country's modernization, as well as of ethnic Ainu people. According to a review of a monographic book on his life and work, "Stillfried came to Japan just as it was opening to trade, tourism, and Western influences. And with the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate, the new imperial government was figuring out how best to represent itself as a modern nation through photography, and Stillfried was well positioned to assist.“

In addition to his own photographic activities, Stillfried trained many Japanese photographers. In 1876, he sold the larger part of his stock to his protégé, the Japanese photographer Kusakabe Kimbei, and left Japan forever in 1881. After travelling to Vladivostok, Hong Kong and Bangkok, he eventually settled in Vienna in 1883. There, he also received an Imperial and Royal Warrant of Appointment as photographer (‘k.u.k. Hof-Photograph’ – ‘kaiserlich und königlich‘).

Stillfried's photographs are presented online by the Nagasaki University Library, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, as well as the J. Paul Getty Museum, and some of his photographic work as well as his water colour paintings are in the collection of the Musée Guimet of Asian Arts in Paris.

Actors	Eating Rice	Geishas at Bath	Hakone Lake	Japanese Warriors	Playing Koto	Princess

Kusakabe Kimbei

(27 November 1841 Kōfu, Yamanashi, Japan – 19 April 1934 Ashiya, Hyogo, Japan)

Kusakabe Kimbei was a Japanese photographer. He usually went by his given name, Kimbei, because his clientele, mostly non-Japanese-speaking foreign residents and visitors, found it easier to pronounce than his family name.

Kusakabe Kimbei worked with Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried as a photographic colourist and assistant. In 1881, Kimbei opened his own workshop in Yokohama, in the Benten-dōri quarter. From 1889, the studio operated in the Honmachi quarter.

By 1893, his was one of the leading Japanese studios supplying art to Western customers. Many of the photographs in the studio's catalogue featured depictions of Japanese women, which were popular with tourists of the time. Kimbei preferred to portray female subjects in a traditional bijinga style, and hired geisha to pose for the photographs. Many of his albums are mounted in accordion fashion.

Kusakabe was at the forefront of creating souvenir photograph albums for western tourists in Yokohama containing hand-painted Japanese prints of landscapes and studio portraits of everyday life in the Meiji period. For this reason he is still better known today in the West than he is in Japan.

Around 1885, Kimbei acquired the negatives of Felice Beato and of Stillfried, as well as those of Uchida Kuichi. Kusakabe also acquired some of Ueno Hikoma's negatives of Nagasaki.

Although historically the works of his mentors are held in such a high regard for their remarkable record of Japan in the 1860s and 1870s, it can be said that from the 1880s no studio had come close to producing as consistent high quality work to that of Kusakabe Kimbei. The quality of the painting and hand-colouring of his photographs are exceptional and in 1891 Kusakabe advertised himself as both photographer and painter. By 1892 his studio had a selection of over 2000 unique Japanese prints of landscapes and studio portraits of Samurai and Geisha as well as scenes of everyday Japanese life available to western tourists.

Kimbei retired as a photographer in 1914.

Canal Biwa Kioto	Carrying Children	Curio Shop	Fishing	Girls Holding a Rope	Honcho Dori, Yokohama	Samurai Portrait	Weaving Silk	Yoshiwara Girls