George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923) was a famous Dutch painter and photographer. He used photographs to capture the fleeting conditions of street life and atmospheric effects – rainy weather in particular – as reference materials for his paintings. Breitner was one of the first photographers to use hand-held cameras, which had just been introduced. He experimented with perspectives and photographed into the light, capturing scenes of urban vitality using deliberately blurred images.
He used a Kodak Nr. 1 Box camera with 100 exposures preloaded. Occasionally, he captured the same subject from different perspectives or under different weather conditions. At other times, he used photography to reference an atmosphere, a light effect, or the weather in the city at a specific moment. In the last decades of his life, Breitner visited Paris, London, and Berlin, among other places, and continued to take photographs.
Below are some stunning historical photos of Amsterdam from the 1890s by George Hendrik Breitner.
