Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820 – 1950

From February 17 to March 17, 1872, the first floor of the Old Town Hall in Prague housed an exhibition of photographs spanning a wide range of subjects and formats. Its organizer, the women's association known as the Union of the Ladies of Saint Anne (Jednota paní sv. Anny), was founded in 1867 to promote "the welfare of families through the purposeful education of youth on a moral and religious basis." [Anonymous author 1867; Tichá 2025] The chairwoman of this now largely forgotten society was Countess Desfours Walderode, with Franzisca Svatava Amerling serving as secretary. Beyond organizing lectures across various fields, this Prague association of philanthropists was also responsible for establishing the Institute for Poor and Feeble-Minded Children in Prague in 1871 – the first private institution of its kind in the country. [Anonymous author 1871a; Anonymous author 1871b] It was in support of this newly founded sanatorium, later known as the Ernestinum, that the Union organized the photography exhibition. Admission was set at 20 Kreuzer, with the exception of Sundays, when the price was halved. The exhibition was open to the public daily from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon. [Anonymous author 1872a] As no catalogue has been found – and indeed the contemporary press contains no mention of one ever being published – our knowledge of the exhibition's contents rests entirely on reviews.

The only substantial account of the exhibition appeared in two instalments in the Prague newspaper Bohemia, where an anonymous reviewer introduced it as follows: "The photography exhibition [...] deserves a large audience for its noble purpose alone, but it also offers art lovers a rare treat in Prague, given the specific nature of the objects on display." [Anonymous author 1872a] Alongside reproductions of works of art, the exhibition presented photographic views of architectural monuments, sculptures and antiquities, as well as images submitted by the Berlin Photographic Society and photographs of artworks from the Dresden, Vienna, and Berlin galleries. The photographs, both large-format and small-format, were complemented by luxury photo albums. At the beginning of March, a second shipment arrived, adding photographs from the Munich Glyptothek and Pinakothek, as well as examples of the Albertotype process – a significantly refined form of collotype, a photomechanical printing technique perfected in 1868 by Munich-based photographer Joseph Albert. [Anonymous author 1872c] The exhibition was dominated by artistic reproductions, both of contemporary painters, including Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Hans Makart, Arthur von Ramberg, and Gabriel Max, as well as Old Masters such as Raphael, Hans Holbein the Younger, Albrecht Dürer, and Lucas Cranach the Elder. The reviewer devotes the greatest attention to these reproductions, focusing primarily on the quality of their execution.

He touches on the fundamental problem of reproducing the colour spectrum: the photographic processes then in use produced monochrome images whose tonal values bore little resemblance to reality. This was because the light-sensitive emulsion of the day, which responded to different colours with unequal intensity – blue, for instance, was typically overexposed, while green, yellow, and red came out darker in the final photograph, producing unsatisfactory results whenever a coloured original was being reproduced [Hess 2018]. Such tonal distortions were plainly visible in the photographic reproduction of Moritz von Schwind's Melusine cycle, produced by Albert. As it happened, the Prague public had had an opportunity to see the watercolour original of the Melusine previous year at the exhibition of the Fine Arts Association (Krasoumná jednota). It was precisely this comparison that led the reviewer to judge the reproductions as not entirely successful, particularly in the greens and reds. "Although the poetic quality of the composition can be felt, the charm of the original is absent [...] and so this reproduction, which we had been so excited to see, disappoints us." [Anonymous author 1872d] Similar shortcomings were noted in Adolphe Braun's photographs of Old Master paintings – except for those reproducing monochrome drawings or sculptures, where the problem of colour transposition did not arise.

This challenge was commonly addressed by photographing not the original work but a graphic or oil copy of it, rendered in shades of grey. This introduced an intermediate step between the original work and the finished photographic reproduction, which undermined authenticity – one of the greatest advantages of photography. Photographic studios hired specialized copyists for this purpose but typically concealed from their customers the fact that the resulting images were not faithful reproductions taken directly from the originals. Nevertheless, as demand for photographic reproductions continued to grow, some artists began to adapt their working methods, willingly producing grey-scale copies of their own works, and in some cases even monochrome originals. [Hess 2018] The reviewer of the Prague exhibition writes: "[...] outstanding artists are already working on their designs with the specific aim of ensuring that, in view of the technical peculiarities of photography, these designs can be reproduced by this means." [Anonymous author 1872b] Wilhelm von Kaulbach, for instance, adapted his practice in precisely this way, producing the highly successful publication, the Goethe-Galerie, with Joseph Albert. Each of the large-format photographs of drawings in the Goethe-Galerie were personally signed by Kaulbach to lend them an aura of authenticity. These and numerous other photographs of Kaulbach's works were on show at the exhibition and were regarded to be among its highlights, as were the reproductions of Arthur von Ramberg's illustrations to Goethe's epic Hermann and Dorothea, produced by the Munich firm of Franz Hanfstaengl.

The exhibition's sole substantial review shows that its author was well versed not only in art but also in the contemporary practices of photographic reproduction, which equipped him to assess the quality of the exhibits with a genuinely critical eye. In the closing section of his critique, he underscored the profound democratic significance of the mass dissemination of photographic reproductions and their power to make the fine arts accessible to large segments of society. The photography exhibition of the Union of the Ladies of Saint Anne served much the same purpose, offering the Prague public an encounter with works from inaccessible private collections and geographically distant galleries that would otherwise have remained entirely beyond their reach.

Denisa Tichá

Works Cited

Anonymous author 1867: Anonymous author, Ein neuer Frauenverein, Prager Abendblatt I (Beilage zur Prager Zeitung), 1867, no. 104, 2. 5., n.p.

Anonymous author 1871a: Anonymous author, Poučné přednášky, Pokrok I, 1871, no. 18, 18. 1., n.p.

Anonymous author 1871b: Anonymous author, Die Idiotenanstalt, Prager Abendblatt V (Beilage zur Prager Zeitung), 1871, no. 142, 19. 6., n.p.

Anonymous author 1872a: Anonymous author, Photographien-Ausstellung, Bohemia (advertisement) XLV, 1872, no. 41, 17. 2., p. 623

Anonymous author 1872b: Anonymous author, Die Ausstellung von Photographien, Bohemia XLV, 1872, no. 44, 21. 2., p. 670

Anonymous author 1872c: Anonymous author, Photographienausstellung, Bohemia XLV, 1872, no. 52, 1. 3., p. 803

Anonymous author 1872d: Anonymous author, Die Ausstellung von Photographien, Bohemia XLV, 1872, no. 47, 24. 2., p. 714

Hess 2018: Helmut Hess, Wiederholungen unter „Hinweglassung jeder Farbe“. Die Grisaille-Kopie als Transkriptionshilfe in der frühen Reproduktionsfotografie, in: Antonia Putzger – Marion Heisterberg – Susanne Müller-Bechtel (eds.), Nichts Neues schaffen. Perspektiven auf die treue Kopie 1300–1900, Berlin 2018, pp. 175–190

Tichá 2025: Denisa Tichá, Fotografie a výstavnictví 19. století v Čechách (thesis), Department of Art History FF UK, Praha 2025, pp. 30–34

Further Reading

Anthony Hamber, “A Higher Branch of the Art”: Photographing the Fine Arts in England. 1839–1880, Amsterdam 1996

Anthony Hamber, Photography of Paintings, in: John Hannavy (ed.), Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Photography I, New York 2008, pp. 1104–1108

Databáze hnutí žen v Habsburské monarchii, Frauen in Bewegung 1848–1938, https://fraueninbewegung.onb.ac.at/node/52, accessed 10. 11. 2025

Karel Amerling, Die Idiotenanstalt des Sct. Anna-Frauen-Vereines in Prag nach ihrem zwölfjährigen Bestande vom J. 1871–1883, Prag 1883

Karel Amerling, Ernestinum. Ústav idiotů Jednoty paní sv. Anny v Praze. Stav po 12 letech trvání (1871–1883), Praha 1998

Anonymous author, Die Photographienausstellung, Prager Abendblatt II (Beilage zur Prager Zeitung), 1872, no. 62, 13. 3., n.p.

Anonymous author, Photographien-Ausstellung, Bohemia XLV, 1872, no. 39, 15. 2., p. 592; no. 41, 17. 2., (advertisement), p. 623

Anonymous author, Photographienausstellung, Bohemia XLV, 1872, no. 52, 1. 3., p. 803

Anonymous author, Tagesanzeiger, Prager Abendblatt V (Beilage zur Prager Zeitung), 1872, no. 46, 23. 2., (advertisement), n.p.; no. 50, 28. 2., (advertisement), n.p.; no. 52, 1. 3., (advertisement), n.p.; no. 62, 13. 3., (advertisement), nestr.

Anonymous author, Tagesanzeiger, Prager Zeitung [LVIII], 1872, no. 54, Beilage (advertisement), 3. 3., n.p.; no. 60, 10. 3., (advertisement), n.p.