Jacobus Anthonie Meessen (5 December 1836 – 14 November 1885) was a Dutch photographer. He took more than 250 portraits and landscapes of the Dutch East Indies between 1864 and 1870. Selected images were given to King William III in an elaborately decorated album in 1871.
About Jacobus Anthonie Meessen in brief
Jacobus Anthonie Meessen (5 December 1836 – 14 November 1885) was a Dutch photographer. He took more than 250 portraits and landscapes of the Dutch East Indies between 1864 and 1870. Meessen worked alone, never taking a partner while in the Indies, and documented the land and people in the colony in his albumen prints. Selected images were given to King William III in an elaborately decorated album in 1871, while more were published by De Bussy in 1875 and exhibited in Paris and Amsterdam. He worked mostly in the capital of Batavia, Java, and Padang, Sumatra; he also photographed Bangka, Belitung, Borneo, and Nias. He died in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 1885; his final years were spent working as an architect.
He was one of the few photographers active in the East Indies in the 1860s; contemporaries included Isidore van Kinsbergen, Adolph Schaefer, and the commercial firm of Woodbury and Page. In his ethnographic photography of the indigenous peoples, he often had to overcome superstitions which, the Bataviaasch Handelsblad wrote, “made taking images of the people outside Java almost impossible” He was married to Johanna Alida Steenbeek, and they had three daughters, the first of whom died in infancy. He is survived by his wife, Johanna, and their three children, all of whom are now living in the U.S. and Canada. He also leaves behind a wife and a son, who worked as a carpenter in the Netherlands.
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