page_title: Jacobus Anthonie Meessen
section_title: Style and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Jacobus Anthonie Meessen / Style and legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Hand-tinted photograph of a njai, circa 1867, by Jacobus Anthonie Meessen. Gelatin silver print on paper, measures 90 by 60 millimetres (3.5&#160;in ×&#160;2.4&#160;in).
context_page_description: Jacobus Anthonie Meessen was a Dutch photographer who took more than 250 portraits and landscapes of the Dutch East Indies between 1864 and 1870. Born to a carpenter in Utrecht, Meessen worked in that trade in the Indies before marrying in the Netherlands in the early 1860s. He returned to the colony in 1864, intent on documenting its land and people. He worked mostly in the capital of Batavia, Java, and Padang, Sumatra; he also photographed Bangka, Belitung, Borneo, and Nias.
  When Meessen returned to the Netherlands in 1870, he established a short-lived partnership with Abraham Vermeulen and began disseminating his photographs. Selected images were given to King William III in an elaborately decorated album in 1871, while more were published by De Bussy in 1875 and exhibited in Paris and Amsterdam. In his final years, Meessen worked predominantly as an architect. Collections of his albumen prints, some of which were hand-tinted or annotated, are held in four institutions in the Netherlands.
context_section_description: Reviewing the quality of Meessen's photography, Boom and Wachilin write that his Javanese pictures are among his best, whereas those from other islands are of more variable quality. They note considerable detail in his cityscapes. He chose buildings to photograph that were popular with other photographers, including the Governor General's Palace and the home of Raden Saleh. Many of his studio portraits appear to be purely commercial, leading Boom and Wachlin to suggest that they were meant to fund Meessen's landscape photography. Some of his images, particularly the portraits, were hand-tinted.
  Meessen's photos from the album he gave to King William III are kept in the Hague at the National Library of the Netherlands. This album features a travelogue regarding Meessen's photography, as well as images from six islands (Java, Sumatra, Bangka, Belitung, Borneo, and Nias) and various ethnic groups, including the Javanese, Chinese, Dayaks, and Malays. He includes commentary on several images of people, noting in an image of njai (concubines): "[They are] a necessary evil for the military. They preserve, in and outside the barracks, the best discipline, and prove invaluable in expeditions or sea journeys."
  Two further photographs, one of the river Ciliwung in Batavia, and another of Kali Mati in Padang, are held at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies holds a copy of the De Bussy publication, and the Leiden University Library holds 281 prints, 7 of which are of disputed provenance, which were donated to the Royal Dutch Geographical Society by Pieter Johannes Veth in 1891. The four extant collections of Meessen's work are considerably fewer than those of his contemporaries such as Woodbury and Page, and his oeuvre has been little studied or collected.
caption: Hand-tinted photograph of a njai by Meessen, c. 1867. He described the concubines as a "necessary evil".[1]
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