Biography

Discussion

Julius Schaarwächter emerges from his own writings and those of others as an energetic man who regularly developed new enterprises, was not possessed of exaggerated modesty, and did not shy away from fierce disputes with competitors.

He came to Amsterdam as the representative for a lithographic printing company. He sold lithographic machines, all sorts of paper goods, prints and playing cards, and produced engraved nameplates, engraved work on gold and silver, and printed visiting cards. Schaarwächter had apparently been trained in the graphic industry before he arrived in The Netherlands. How he came to master the techniques of photography is not known, but the step from the lithographic to the photographic sector was not that great, and was made by many others in those years too.

Photography would increasingly become the most important, and ultimately the only source of his income. In the first years he certainly needed income from the printing and engraving businesses to supplement his earnings as a photographer. After 1860, when, with the rise of the inexpensive carte de visite portrait and the accompanying rage for photo albums, it became fashionable for every self-respecting burgher to sit for his or her portrait, Schaarwächter could live off photography and the sale of photographic equipment. Where he and begun by declaring himself a ‘commissionair’ for official purposes, in the 1850s that became an ‘engraver and photographer’, and after 1860 just ‘photographer’. Schaarwächter had prepared for the transition to photography thoroughly; not only did he do portraits, but also provided the paraphernalia to go with them: a broad assortment of „…Cadres, Etuis, Medaillons etc. intended to contain portraits…”.

Julius Schaarwächter was the first photographer to settle permanently in Nijmegen with his own studio. Until his arrival, the citizens of Nijmegen had to content themselves with the work of travelling portraitists. In the summer of 1851 there were even two of them staying in the city at the same time. The daguerreotypes done by these photographers were not always of the best quality; reason therefore for Schaarwächter to praise the high level of his own portraits all the more avidly. Over the quarter century that he worked in Nijmegen there were at least twelve other photographers active there, some for only a couple of years, others for longer periods. Apparently any time Schaarwächter had the feeling that his position was being threatened by a serious competitor, he revealed a less congenial side. A case in point involved the Arnhem photographer E.M.A. van der Burght, who settled in Nijmegen in 1866. He announced his arrival in the city in a poem in the Nijmeegsche Courant, in which he urged the reader to have his portrait done as a gift for a sweetheart, child or other significant other. Schaarwächter responded with an unfriendly announcement in the same newspaper, in which he wrote that a „charlatan” was trying to flog his shoddy workmanship „with choppy, limping verses”. A sarcastic answer from Van der Burght followed, provoking another angry reaction from Schaarwächter; the two gentlemen, undoubtedly to the amusement of the reading public, filled the advertising columns for several weeks with their bickering and mutual taunts. This episode is chiefly interesting because it shows how highly Schaarwächter esteemed his own qualities. In one of the advertisements he paints himself as a sort of Nestor of Nijmegen photography: „Someone, who has been settled in one place for 15 years, who has acquired lasting repute, as is proven by the constant, unexpected call upon his services, to whom, in one exhibition by photographers, the first prize was awarded, whose tuition has been enjoyed by a large number of photographers, and whose counsel is still asked by them daily…”. For the rest, Schaarwächter could not have been doing badly, despite the competition. In 1857 he expanded his activities to Tiel, opening a photo studio there too.

Beginning in 1858 he regularly made his presence felt as an author, writing particularly on the technical aspects of photography. In various periodicals devoted to the applied arts he published articles on the dry collodion method, photographing on glass and oilcloth, enlargers and photographic reproduction techniques. In 1864 he published a 16 page pamphlet entitled Handleiding tot het vervaardigen der Chromo-photographiën, tot het kleuren der photographiën met olieverf en tot het kleuren der photographiën op albumine-papier, benevens voorschriften tot het prepareren der benodigde verwen. He surrounded this booklet with considerable mystery; he sold it for two guilders and fifty cents, in sealed wrappers, with the warning that opened copies would not be taken back. Buyers who expected that for this not inconsiderable sum they would be vouchsafed the latest technical advances did not get their money’s worth. The pamphlet was harshly criticized in the Tijdschrift voor Photographie, because, upon reading, it appeared that most of the information it offered was already known from an English booklet on colour in photography.

In 1865 Schaarwächter himself provided a contribution to the Tijdschrift voor Photographie. It was a report on the state of photography in Berlin, London and Paris, as he had found it during his recent trips to these cities. In Paris he had visited an atelier for photographic sculpture, in Berlin he had experimented with the new magnesium light, for which, though, he expected little, an had also seen a number of interesting applications of photography, such as photographs on enamel and porcelain. In the field of optics he had however found little that was new since previous years. Schaarwächter suggested that in the future he might regularly prepare a similar overview of new photographic developments for the magazine.

That never came to pass, because in the same year, 1865, Schaarwächter himself founded a magazine, De Navorscher op het gebied der Photographie en Phototypie, Tijdschrift voor Photographie en aanverwante wetenschappen. For twelve years – until it ceased to appear in 1877 – he personally performed the editorial duties for this periodical, and was also its principle author, with his own contributions and translations of articles from foreign magazines. It was his ambition to closely follow technical developments and subsequently make them accessible for Dutch readers in understandable language.

As a photographer Schaarwächter devoted himself primarily to the production of portraits. When he opened the doors of his Nijmegen studio in 1851, the daguerreotype was experiencing its greatest flowering in The Netherlands, and Schaarwächter’s first photographs were therefore made with this procedure. Examples of these have not been found. Of the many portraits that Schaarwächter must have done over the years, several dozen portraits of Nijmegen notables have been preserved in carte de visite format. Without exception these are of high quality: sharp, with rich contrasts, efficient lighting, and well thought-through composition.

Large salt prints (also known as talbotypes or calotypes) of portraits, coloured with pastels or opaque water colours, and amphitype portraits were also part of Schaarwächter’s repertoire. The examples which have been preserved are all framed; they were affordable alternatives for painted portraits. They have been coloured in an extremely careful manner, by someone with the skilled hand of a draughtsman.

There are also landscapes and views of Nijmegen and villages in the vicinity to be found in Schaarwächter’s oeuvre. He photographed the fortifications of Nijmegen several years before they were demolished at the orders of the City Fathers; he also did photographs in Hees, Groesbeek and Berg en Dal, among other places. He liked to enliven his village scenes with several human figures, not too prominent in the foreground, but as an embellishment of the middle distance. In addition to the usual villagers, posing somewhat awkwardly, he also had a regular ‘model’. This man – perhaps an assistant who accompanied him on his trips – appears on several photographs, clothed in a long jacket, provided with a pipe and cap, and standing in a graceful pose. In the years 1870 and 1871 Schaarwächter did a surprising photo series of the today no longer extant Huis Hulzen and its park. The albumin prints stand out for the great sharpness of their detail across the whole image plane and the fine nuancing of the light and dark tints, but especially for the unconventional, ‘modern’ looking compositions. Neither the beautiful house and its outbuildings, nor the members of the owner’s family who were included in the photographs to enliven the scenes, but rather the pattern of the paths which ran through the park and the lawns and trees which contrasted with them, were the real subject of the photographs. By keeping the horizon low in the image and having the rows of trees alternate with vistas, Schaarwächter gave these landscape photographs a sense of great depth. In a genre that was actually little practised in The Netherlands, landscape and nature photography, this series is a high point in the oeuvre Schaarwächter has bequeathed to us.

In all respects Julius Schaarwächter must be regarded as an indefatigable promoter of photography in The Netherlands. He was not only an outstanding photographer whose work was a significant impetus for early landscape photography, but he was moreover an enthusiastic author of technical, theoretical and educational articles on photography, and as founder and editor of a photographic periodical, the second in the Netherlands, he brought the profession to the attention of a wide audience.

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