Portret van een vrouw 1874 - 1887

Albert Greiner made this portrait of a woman, using the albumen print technique. It comes to us from a time when photography was becoming more and more available to the middle classes of Europe. While the sitter’s name is not recorded, we can see the marks of her class on display. Her dress is adorned with beading, and worn with a large puffed sleeve which shows her awareness of current trends. Her hair is styled neatly. Although we do not know the woman's name, she is participating in the social trend of making a portrait. The studio portrait had become a way of cementing one’s place in society. The Rijksmuseum is a key institution in the development of Dutch national identity, and it is in collections like these that we can start to trace the social history of photography and its cultural significance. To understand it better, we might look into photography journals from the time and also records of portrait studios.