Eduard Isaac Asser (19 October 1809 – 21 September 1894) was a lawyer and

Dutch Dutch or Nederlands commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands ** Dutch people as an ethnic group () ** Dutch nationality law, history and regulations of Dutch citizenship () ** Dutch language () * In specific terms, i ...

amateur photographer.

Biography

Asser was born in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...

and became a successful lawyer and was thus able to afford his photography hobby, which was very expensive at the time.

Contributions

Asser's experiments with

Daguerrotype Daguerreotype was the first publicly available photographic process, widely used during the 1840s and 1850s. "Daguerreotype" also refers to an image created through this process. Invented by Louis Daguerre and introduced worldwide in 1839, t ...

were initially reproductions of academic art. He is best known for his efforts to make the photographic printing process cheaper, most notably with his patent on the ''Procédé Asser'' in 1858, a

photolithography Photolithography (also known as optical lithography) is a process used in the manufacturing of integrated circuits. It involves using light to transfer a pattern onto a substrate, typically a silicon wafer. The process begins with a photosensiti ...

process. He was an editor of the Dutch photography magazine and member of the Amsterdam photographers' society ''Helios''.

Legacy

Asser died in

and he is considered the father of photography in the Netherlands. His descendants gave 200 of his earliest photos from 1839–1860 to the national collection in 1993. Since then they have been kept in the

Rijksmuseum The Rijksmuseum () is the national museum of the Netherlands dedicated to Dutch arts and history and is located in Amsterdam. The museum is located at the Museum Square in the borough of Amsterdam South, close to the Van Gogh Museum, the S ...

. Besides using art studio techniques for still lifes, Asser took many pictures of his family, most notably a childhood portrait of

Tobias Asser Tobias Michael Carel Asser (; 28 April 1838 – 29 July 1913) was a Dutch lawyer and legal scholar. In 1911, he won the Nobel Peace Prize (together with Alfred Fried) for his role in the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the ...

References

External links

Website for early photography in the Netherlands
an initiative of Mattie Boom (curator of photography at the Rijksmuseum), Saskia Asser (his great-great-granddaughter and curator at

Huis Marseille Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography is the oldest photography museum in Amsterdam. The museum is housed in a monumental canal house at Keizersgracht 401. Since 1999, it has served as the first museum in the Netherlands fully dedicated to photog ...

), and the Photography Foundation in Amsterdam
Eduard Isaac Asser
in the

Eduard Isaac Asser
in the

Joods Historisch Museum The (; ), part of the Jewish Cultural Quarter, is a museum in Amsterdam dedicated to Jewish history, culture and religion, in the Netherlands and worldwide. It is the only museum in the Netherlands dedicated to Jewish history. History The Jood ...

1809 births 1894 deaths Photographers from Amsterdam {{Photographer-stub