Staande vrouw voor geschilderd interieur c. 1865 - 1900

Laurens Lodewijk Kleijn made this photograph, "Standing Woman Before Painted Interior", sometime in the 19th century. It stages a woman in contemporary dress before a painted backdrop. The photograph performs a balancing act between the real and the artificial. The woman's averted gaze and the backdrop's idealized nature scene evokes the Romantic era, a cultural movement that was by then well-established. But photography, itself a relatively new technology, was rapidly changing visual culture and the institutions of art. Painting was no longer the sole means of capturing reality. The photograph suggests a modern understanding that images are constructed, not simply reflections of the world. To fully understand this image we could research the development of photography in the Netherlands and the popular entertainments of the period. The meaning of art is contingent on its social and institutional context, and such research is crucial to our understanding.