Investigation and Conservation of Burnt Albumen Prints: The Bauduin Collection at the Rijksmuseum

Abstract

ABSTRACT Antoon Bauduin (1820–1885) was a doctor and amateur photographer who lived in Nagasaki between 1862 and 1870. With his brother Albert (1829–1890), he collected prints by other photographers that depict the locations they travelled to in Asia. In 2016, descendants of the Bauduin brothers donated 121 albumen prints from that period, which were partially damaged by a fire in the 1980s, to the Rijksmuseum. In 2017, for her bachelor’s thesis in conservation, Elisa Carl researched a practical method to render the burnt albumen prints safe for handling. In preparation for the exhibition Early Photographs of Japan in 2022, the collection was treated and is now accessible to the public in the Rijksmuseum’s reading room. This paper discusses the research and experiments necessary to develop the conservation treatment of these burnt photographs. It also demonstrates the potential of Macro X-ray fluorescence (MA-XRF) scanning in recovering pictorial information from charred photographs.