Biography

Discussion

Godfried de Groot was one of the last old-fashioned ‘master’ photographers of a studio where chiefly portraits were made. He was an impassioned, hard-working photographer as well as an ‘artist’ with the usual caprices. While generally a friendly man who treated his clients with courtesy, when it came to his personnel De Groot was prone to occasional outbursts of anger. He enjoyed a grand lifestyle and was a well-to-do aesthete. Photography, horse riding, antiques, and his villa and garden in Naarden were De Groot’s primary interests. He was perhaps someone who felt more at home in the gay scene than the photography world.

Prior to working on his own, Godfried de Groot assisted various photographers in the years 1908 to 1922. Not much is known regarding his apprenticeships with S. Dijkstra (Den Helder), Pierre Weynen (‘s-Hertogenbosch), Hartmann (Bad Nauheim, Germany), and Bernhard Jacobs (Amsterdam). Among De Groot’s mentors, however, Frits Geveke was most well known, a skilled but rather unoriginal portrait photographer from Amsterdam for whom De Groot is likely to have worked in the years 1917 to 1921. Geveke photographed a large number of Dutch actors and actresses. At the time he began working on his own, De Groot is said to have left with a portion of Geveke’s theatre clientele.

In 1922 or 1923, Godfried de Groot opened a studio at Amstellaan 64-III (the present-day ‘Vrijheidslaan’) in Amsterdam, where his mother and sister Betsy had been living for some time. His sister frequently posed as his model, until leaving for the Dutch East Indies in 1925. In that year, De Groot himself moved to the adjacent building at No. 66. Behind his home, he had a garden house built, which he set up as a daylight studio. A rear room in the main house served as a reception space, with the two front windows on the street used to showcase his photographs. Based in part on the advice of his friend Piet Bakker, De Groot purchased the building at Jan Luykenstraat 2a in 1928, which directly faced the northwest facade of the Rijksmuseum. This building, as well as the one adjacent to it at No. 2, was designed just prior to the turn of the century by the architect Eduard Cuypers, who lived and ran his architectural firm in these two buildings right up until his death in 1927. With De Groot’s acquisition of the building at 2a, he was now living in a neighbourhood of ‘high standing’, where he too would remain until his death in 1963.

The building at Jan Luykenstraat 2a, which initially served not only as De Groot’s studio but also his private residence, was chicly furnished. It was clear what kind of clients he had in mind. While De Groot was indeed fond of beautiful antique objects himself, he also wished to impress his customers. As a rule, he photographed by appointment only. A house servant was always present to open the door and run daily errands, as well preparing lunch for De Groot, and later Jan Wieling, who was De Groot’s life partner from 1936 on and who also oversaw the business side of the company. On the ground floor to the right of the entry hall, there was a reception room furnished with antiques and several beautiful photographs. The studio was on the second floor. In order to get there, one could either take the electric lift or use the stairway. The latter choice appears to have been most frequently used, and considering the added presence of photos and antiques, it gave De Groot’s clients an additional opportunity to be impressed. Initially, the entire second floor was used as a studio. By the late 1930s, however, De Groot had moved to Naarden and the front room on this floor was refurnished as a pied-à-terre.

Godfried de Groot photographed almost exclusively in his studio, where he was able to control the lighting and background. It was in his studio on the Jan Luykenstraat that he made the shift from daylight to artificial light. During his photo shoots, De Groot used various props, including several large, rectangular blocks and a platform in the form of a quarter-circle with steps leading up to it. By having people lean against or sit on one of the blocks, his clients could easily move about and ‘reposition’ themselves if need be. In this way, he avoided poses that were stiff and awkward. Moreover, De Groot had the talent of putting people at ease and was quite socially adept, always treating his subjects with courtesy and respect. He got along particularly well with women, who were said to fall for his charms on occasion. De Groot used flattery to his advantage and knew how to make a woman feel beautiful. He could also become completely enamoured of a woman while working with the camera. While this surely entailed an element of theatrics at times, his enthusiasm was often sincere. Godfried de Groot loved people and preferred to photograph them when looking their best. In an article written in memorial, Hans Dukkers recalled De Groot’s own words in this respect: ‘I make photos that a woman can give to her husband or her boyfriend: I photograph women in a way that men want to see them, perhaps somewhat more beautiful than they really are, but, I hope, without being artificial. I photograph with my heart and, just as a psychiatrist, I’m perhaps briefly in love with a woman when she’s standing in front of my lens.’ When a client worked well as a model and De Groot was enthusiastic, a session could easily go on for an hour. This ability to put people at ease occurred not only before a photo shoot had begun, but also for the remainder of its duration. He achieved this mainly by just talking. While changing the lighting, adjusting the camera, or directing his sitter in front of the camera, he simply continued his conversation. Operating the shutter from a distance via a rubber ball attached to a long tube, De Groot was often able to catch people off guard—with a client not knowing the precise moment when the next shot would be taken.

Besides an occasional fashion and advertising photo, Godfried de Groot’s photography was generally limited to portraits only. He targeted a clientele that was financially well off—people who could afford to have a high-quality portrait made for a price that reflected as much. Over the length of his career, many famous Dutch people came to sit in front of De Groot’s camera, a long list comprising mainly actors, but also dancers, musicians, writers, the mayor of Amsterdam (Dr. W. de Vlugt), the director of the Rijksmuseum (Dr. F. Schmidt-Degener), and the Dutch monarch, Queen Wilhelmina.

De Groot’s flattering and on occasion glamorous portraits are representative of the pictorialist tradition: beautiful portraits, produced with great care. Along with Franz Ziegler, Willem Coret and Hanna Elkan, he belonged to the younger generation of Dutch pictorialist photographers. While the style and working method of this group were perhaps quite similar, many of De Groot’s photos can be distinguished from others through his studied application of light and the poses of the people he portrayed. The influence of film star portraits on his work is unmistakable, with his photos sharing similarities to German glamour photographs filling the pages of magazines published prior to the World War II, such as Cinema & Theater.

In approximately three-quarters of his photos, Godfried de Groot applied a concise ‘stylistic vocabulary’ to be summarised as follows: light falls on just one of the shoulders, to one side of the face (usually the left), the ridge of the nose, the hair, and sometimes one ear. In men’s portraits, the white collar is usually the lightest part of the photo; in women’s portraits, jewellery worn about the neck quite often glares to the point of being blurred. De Groot frequently shot photographs diagonally from the side, with the head usually turned in relation to the torso. Portraits made in profile are less common. Rarely is someone portrayed laughing or looking directly into the lens. The tint of the face, hair, and clothing generally contrasts with that of the background. De Groot was continually striving to find new variations through a combination of these ‘basic ingredients’, ensuring no portrait was precisely the same.

The diagonal tilting of the face and body encountered incidentally in De Groot’s images betrays a slight influence stemming from New Photography. In the application of blur and the flattering nature of his photos, however, De Groot’s work is much more representative of the pictorialist movement that preceded it. At best, he is no more than a transitional figure in this regard.

After the Second World War, a minor shift occurred in De Groot’s approach to photography. It seems that from this point onward, he rarely relied on the soft-focus lens and instead shifted his attention to apportioning large areas of light and dark. While De Groot’s post-war photos are indeed by no means exceedingly sharp, from a certain distance, they give the appearance of being sharp. Moreover, it seems he was no longer painting in the backgrounds of his negatives, but had instead begun to use foil or reed mats as a backdrop, which photographed somewhat blurry. In some of his photos, De Groot projected shadows onto his backdrops. While it had long been the custom to portray actors in a given scene wearing their theatrical costumes, De Groot almost always produced their image in the form of a portrait. As a result, virtually no distinction can be made between the portraits he made for celebrity figures and those for ordinary people. Dancers, on the other hand, were frequently photographed in a dancer’s pose. Rarely did De Groot rely on attributes.

Very few examples of De Groot’s nude photographs, which he shot in large numbers, have been preserved. Some of these photos were most definitely unsuitable for publication, to which the memoires of a male model from the 1930s attest. Others were decent enough to be submitted to exhibitions.

Right up until the end of his life, De Groot used a large, wooden studio camera. In a discussion of a photo featured in a 1937 issue of Cosmorama, an 18×24 camera is mentioned, a Perscheid 5.5/60 cm objective, and the use of seven incandescent lamps, each 500-Watts. He had no need for a photometer nor fixed time settings for the shutter: De Groot simply ‘knew’ how long one-fifth of a second lasted. His darkroom was small and sparsely furnished. As a rule, De Groot printed his photos himself. Although perhaps lacking in theoretical training, he was a master of every trick of the trade. His assistants occasionally helped with adjusting the lighting or printing the photos. Their primary task, however, was to do the finishing: the rinsing, drying, glossing, retouching, mounting, and framing. To increase the shelf life of his photos, De Groot allowed them to rinse for a long period of time (up to one-and-a-half hours). The finishing took place in a workshop on the ground floor, located behind the reception room.

De Groot’s general practice was to produce three ‘unretouched proofs’ that were subsequently presented to his clients. Definitive prints were then made based on the client’s selection. De Groot worked with carbon printing and other pigment printing processes during the early years of his career, but after this never again. Most of his prints were made on bromide paper, as well making use of special papers such as velvety Gevaluxe Velours and the green-tinted Gevaert Verdex.

Godfried de Groot loved beautiful and flattering portraits. The dancer Tony Raedt wrote on the reverse side of a photo taken by De Groot between 1942 and 1947: ‘Here I am in a dance with Mascha [ter Weeme], my partner. Too bad that in reality we are six times as old, and twelve times as ugly.’ Raedt was exaggerating, of course, but it was common practice for parts of a photo to be retouched once the shoot had been completed, both on the negative and the print. Face, throat, neck, arms and hands were often made to look more slender, eyelashes were sometimes filled in, with pupils, eyebrows, and jewellery accentuated. Minor skin blemishes were hidden away with retouching. Prior to World War II, abstract smudges were ‘nonchalantly’ applied directly on the negatives of many of De Groot’s photos for the purpose of enlivening the background.

It is not known how many shots De Groot took over the length his forty-year career, but the number is certain to have been in the several tens of thousands. Based on a list comprising the names of those individuals he photographed in the period from mid-1941 to mid-1944, it appears he produced on average approximately 150 negatives per month. The negative numbers on this list go from 22,330 (the portrait of a fellow photographer, Hanna Elkan) to 27,495. Godfried de Groot, who started from nothing, became quite wealthy. His rates were by no means cheap, as his clients recalled. The quality he provided and his circle of ‘famous’ clientele as well drew people to the studio for whom a portrait by De Groot was undoubtedly an expensive undertaking.

Actors and other artists, by contrast, constituted a group that probably rarely had to pay. De Groot would have considered such business as excellent advertising, while at the same time undoubtedly facing competition from his rival in this regard, Jacob Merkelbach. Yet artists in their turn likewise used De Groot’s portraits to promote their own careers. Besides the entryway of the building on the Jan Luykenstraat, De Groot had a display case on the corner of the Hobbemastraat and the Vossiusstraat in Amsterdam. An advertising column that stood for many years on the Leidseplein provided another location for him to show his photos, chosen surely in part for its close vicinity to Merkelbach’s studio.

De Groot submitted his work to various newspapers and magazines. At no was he employed as a staff photographer or the principal supplier of photographs for any one magazine. Programmes for theatre companies were illustrated with De Groot’s photos on a regular basis.

A high point in De Groot’s career was unquestionably the commission he received in 1937 to make several state portraits of Queen Wilhelmina. An assignment of this nature was an honourable, albeit somewhat precarious task, considering the protocol it entailed. De Groot’s usual approach, i.e. putting clients at ease by carrying on a casual conversation, was now of no use. In the contract for the photo session that was drawn up between the royal court and De Groot, the photographer was granted permission, based on several conditions, to distribute three approved portraits as he saw fit and under his own supervision. For months, De Groot produced large quantities of prints that were then put on display in a wide variety of locations. The portraits were also reproduced by a number of publishers. De Groot apparently made a small fortune from this commission. By his own account, it was with these funds that he built his villa ‘De Eickenhorst’ on the Meentweg in Naarden, where he would continue to reside, together with Jan Wieling, up until his death.

After producing two more group portraits with the queen in 1938, De Groot subsequently filed a request to bear the title of ‘court photographer’. Such requests were normally granted once one had proved his merit. In this case, however, there was a problem. For some unapparent personal reason, Dr. W. de Vlugt, the mayor of Amsterdam, refused to give his support. As a consequence, the court commission denied De Groot’s request. The passe-partouts and photo folders bearing the pre-printed text ‘court photographer’ turned out to be premature. Whether it was the nominal honour of such a title or the hope that De Groot would be named as the de facto successor to Ziegler as court photographer remains unclear. Following Ziegler’s sudden death in late 1939, it was simply too late for De Groot to be given a second opportunity. The outbreak of World War II was just around the corner, and by the time it was over, De Groot’s social prestige had taken such a blow that his eligibility for such a position had been reduced to nothing.

To what degree Godfried de Groot collaborated with the Germans during World War II can no longer be determined with certainty. Surviving documentation in relation to this matter proves inconclusive. There is no doubt that De Groot was a member of the NSB (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, the Dutch ‘National Socialists Movement’). In the dossier compiled following his arrest by the Politieke Opsporingsdienst (‘Political Investigation Department’) on 16 July 1945, based on the suspicion of membership in the NSB, various motives for his involvement were cited (as stated by De Groot and others): the fear of being persecuted for his homosexuality; as a cover to conceal activity that was illegal at the time (including the production of passport photos and protecting individuals who were in hiding); to promote the sale of Queen Wilhelmina’s portraits. A lack of personal strongwill and political naivety in general should perhaps also be considered. Why De Groot’s membership in the NSB was then later revoked likewise remains just as elusive. At one point, the following report appeared in Volk en Vaderland, the NSB’s weekly: ‘Hereby expelled, as a member of the Movement by the Secretary General, is Gottfr. de Groot, Jan Luykenstraat 2a, registry number 135475. This expulsion is based on grounds, which make the retaining of this membership undesirable.’ According to De Groot, he was expelled because he refused to provide photos to the NSB’s Photo Department.

Following his arrest by the Politieke Opsporingsdienst, De Groot was imprisoned for almost one year—until June 1946—at the ‘Interneeringskamp Weeshuis-Kazerne’ (‘Internment Camp Orphanage-Barracks’) and the ‘Centraal Bewarings- en Verblijfskamp Laren (N.H.)’ (‘Central Detention and Residency Camp Laren North Holland’). He was one of many thousands of former NSB members who were interned at these camps. One factor is likely to have complicated De Groot’s case. Prior to the war, he was involved in a long-term relationship with Piet Bakker, who had also been his procurator from 1929 on. Bakker had been arrested in December 1939 for transmitting radio messages from the Dutch town of Schiebroek to Germany concerning weather and soil conditions in the Netherlands. Such activity was in violation of Dutch neutrality and he was sentenced to six years in prison. When the Germans invaded the Netherlands, Bakker was set free, having served only a small portion of his sentence. After the liberation, however, he was once again a wanted man. Having established that De Groot was still in contact with Bakker after May 1940, the Dutch authorities had hoped to find him through De Groot. In the end, Bakker was never found and as far as is known never returned to the Netherlands.

On 8 June 1946, the fiscal prosecutor granted Godfried de Groot temporary immunity from legal prosecution for unspecified reasons and placed him under the supervision of the STPD (Stichting Toezicht Politieke Delinquenten, ‘Foundation for the Monitoring of Political Delinquents’). De Groot was required to pay Dfl. 150 and was placed on probation for a period of three years. In addition, a number of his civil rights were taken away. During his internment, De Groot’s financial capital (described as ‘enemy-related’ or ‘NSB’ capital) was to be monitored by the NBI (Nederlands Beheersinstituut, ‘Netherlands Governance Institute’). Following his arrest, various photographers and a photo press agency had filed requests to manage the running of the studio. The organisation Volksherstel (‘The Peoples’ Recovery’) proposed that Hanna Elkan should be made the new company supervisor, considering the loss she suffered during the war. The NBI, however, instead chose Arnold Eysvogel (an attorney, not a photographer) to become the studio’s manager as of 4 September 1945. It was then that the studio reopened for the first time since it had been shut down in 1944, with no access to electricity. From this point forward, an assistant and an intern assistant now carried out the studio’s work.

Three months after De Groot was granted temporary immunity from further legal prosecution, the supervisory role accorded the NBI—i.e. Arnold Eysvogel—was lifted. As of 1 January 1947, the procuratorship that De Groot had once granted to Piet Bakker also expired. From that day forward, De Groot and Wieling ran the studio in the form of a general partnership. More than two years later, the partnership was dissolved, with De Groot running the company on his own. Later on, Wieling was again reinstated as a business partner. While it is true that portrait photography was in decline both before, and especially after, the Second World War—a concern clearly expressed by photography magazines—De Groot continued with portraiture as his specialty and was never financially obliged to do anything else.

Up until World War II, professional photography had been primarily concerned with portraiture. After the war, there were many more options: fashion, advertising, and reportage photography. De Groot always managed to survive on portrait photography. Prior to the first signs of his illness circa 1960, his studio was by no means out-dated: both private individuals and renowned personalities still found their way to the studio on the Jan Luykenstraat. After the war, however, De Groot’s aesthetic appeal and flattering style were a far cry from anything that was considered modern. The post-war generation of photographers no longer wished to take ‘beautiful pictures’. Most of those working in the same manner as De Groot had either died or closed their studios during the years of the war, including Henri Berssenbrugge, Francis Kramer, Jacob Merkelbach, Franz Ziegler, Bernard Eilers, and Frits Geveke. After the war, photographers such as the Particam group or Lemaire & Wennink typically photographed actors on location. De Groot, by contrast, continued to work at his studio. The sparse examples of his fashion photography indicate his work in this area was somewhat more contemporary. A majority of these photos show the model photographed in full-length against a solid white background, with only a decorative shadow invigorating the photo.

From 1928 onward, Godfried de Groot was a member of the NFPV (Nederlandse Fotografen Patroons Vereniging, ‘Netherlands Photographers Guild’). It is not known whether he played an active role in the association. Not until 1949 did he become a member of the NFK (‘Nederlandse Fotografen Kunstkring’, Netherlands Photographers Art Society’). Here too his participation was unremarkable: having failed to become a principal member of this group in the first five years, his name was eventually removed from the membership list. In the period that De Groot was still a member of the NFK, the renowned Dutch writer Godfried Bomans wrote a piece on early and modern portraiture. To the surprise of several of the group’s members, Bomans cited Godfried de Groot—of all people—as an example of modern portrait photography. Within the NFK itself, De Groot was by no means considered modern. According to Willy Schurman, De Groot’s ‘fake romance’ was unbefitting the society.

Over the years, Godfried de Groot had worked with a great number of assistants. During his heydays just prior to the war, he probably had approximately ten people working for him at any one time, including a house servant and a receptionist. Of De Groot’s former apprentices, Willy Schurman, Cor van Weele, and Eddy Posthuma de Boer are best known. Franz Ziegler’s youngest sister also worked for him. The story that the First Earl of Snowdon, Tony Armstrong-Jones, worked as an assistant of De Groot must be dismissed as fable. Lord Snowdon, in any event, denies even ever having met him. One former assistant in whose work De Groot’s influence is to be observed is Willy Schurman. Peter Selby’s primary motivation in taking over the studio shortly after De Groot’s death was chiefly motivated by considerations of a business nature, though he continued to work in his predecessor’s style. While it is true that Godfried de Groot was forgotten after his death—even something as simple as the year of his death was difficult to ascertain for quite some time—his name came to be associated with various myths inspired, for instance, by the disappearance of his archive.

After a lengthy sickbed, De Groot died of cancer on 2 June 1963. Just a short time before, his studio had been sold to Colour Applications Ltd., a British firm involved in photography, but also in a wide range of other activities. Peter Selby acted as the director of the company’s new branch office in Amsterdam. As a photographer, Selby’s primary interest was fashion and colour advertising. The studio’s portrait photographer at this time was Theo Teuwen, who worked in a second studio space set up in the former reception room. Teuwen had already taken De Groot’s place at the time he had fallen ill and would continue to make portraits in the same style until 1965.

The studio held on to the name of Godfried de Groot, with a share of the photos still being signed as such. A number of artists’ portraits bear the names Peter Selby and Colour Applications. Eventually, the studio moved to a location on the Prinsengracht, closing definitively in 1971. By his own account, it was Selby who asked that De Groot’s formidable archive be destroyed at the time he relinquished the studio, as no one had shown any interest in taking over the negatives and photos. It is for this reason that only a small portion of Godfried de Groot’s work has been preserved.

Documentation