From 22 December 2008 to 22 February 2009, the Jewish Historical
Museum will present the evocative exhibition Coloured
images. Unique, hand-tinted lantern slides from the American
Colony (a religious community founded by American Christians)
project an image of the 'Holy Land' that is literally and
figuratively coloured; literally in that they were tinted by hand,
and figuratively in that they present a romanticized image.
In 1926 and 1931 the grain dealer Arie Speelman (1880-1964) and
his wife Anne Christine Speelman-van Vliet (1886-1967) took two
trips to Palestine, where they bought more than a thousand
hand-tinted lantern slides at a photo shop run by the American
Colony. The slides are examples of a very special photographic
technique, in which a negative is printed on a glass plate and then
skilfully hand-tinted, often with hair's-breadth precision. A
second plate of glass is then placed on top, creating a slide for
use in a magic lantern.
The exhibition features a selection of about fifty slides from the
Jewish Historical Museum's exceptional collection. The photos give
a fascinating impression of late nineteenth and early
twentieth-century Palestine, showing not only the cities of
Jerusalem and Jaffa, cityscapes, landscapes, and the area's diverse
ethnic groups, but also the city of Tel Aviv as it appeared exactly
100 years ago.
The exhibition marks the publication of the book In the
Footsteps of Abraham: The Holy Land in Hand-Painted
Photographs, by Richard Hardiman and Helen Speelman, a
granddaughter of Arie Speelman who lives in Israel. The book is
available at the Jewish Historical Museum shop for the special
price of €34.95.
Click here
for more information about the exhibition.
For visual materials or
more information, please contact the Marketing & Communication
Department:
T +31 (0)20 531 0370
E communication