10 things to know about the earliest photographs of Japan

The photographs of Japan shot by Antoon Bauduin around 1865 are the very first to have been taken there by a Dutch person. They offer a rare glimpse of the country in a period when very few foreigners live there.

Antoon Bauduin went to Japan at the invitation of its government, to run a new hospital and teach Japanese students. He took photographs purely for his own pleasure, and never sold them. That’s the reason they are so rare.

Antoon’s brother Albert also lived in Japan, where he worked for the Netherlands Trading Society (NHM). The brothers lived for many years on the small island of Dejima in Nagasaki Bay. Antoon shot portraits there, in his tiny studio.

Antoon himself frequently appears in his own photos – someone else was apparently operating the camera for these shots. We don’t know whether his brother had any part in this, but Albert did buy photographs, especially when he was travelling without Antoon.

Antoon returned to the Netherlands in 1870, and his brother Albert following him four years later. Neither of them had children, but the photographs they brought back were kept in the family until very recently – in 2016 the heirs gifted 121 of Antoon’s photographs to the Rijksmuseum.

When a fire broke out at the heirs’ home in 1985, many of the photographs were partially burned –the chest in which they were kept saved them from total destruction. They were restored in the years that followed the fire.

Belonging as they did to such a small community, the two brothers personally knew almost all the people in Antoon’s photographs. This is the reason no names are written on the back of the photographs, and we are unable to identify most of the people in them.

The person seated next to Antoon in this photograph is probably his fellow physician Matsuki Koan. The two men are shown here as each other’s equals, something that was by no means a given in Asia in this period, when colonialist attitudes prevailed.

Photography in this period was a complex, time-consuming and expensive activity, and the cameras were heavy. Antoon nonetheless photographed many landscapes in the rural surroundings of Nagasaki. Nowadays the entire area is completely built up, and unrecognisable.

If a photographer wished to show more of a scene than would fit on a single photograph, he or she could rotate the camera a little after each shot and later attach the images together to form a continuous, elongated image: a panorama.