Portret van twee mensen, mogelijk Margo de Lange en August Kessler 1874 - 1887

Curator: This gelatin-silver print, housed here at the Rijksmuseum, is entitled "Portret van twee mensen, mogelijk Margo de Lange en August Kessler", created sometime between 1874 and 1887 by Albert Greiner. I always found the dating so fascinating… the cusp of things. Editor: What immediately strikes me is the formal stillness, almost staged, but softened around the edges. It breathes the sigh of Romanticism; look at how her hand rests almost protectively on his shoulder, creating an intimate geometry of shared space. What does that hand say to you? Curator: The tenderness gets to me! He sits so confidently, leg casually crossed, but her gentle touch tells a silent story. It makes me wonder what their relationship was really like…were they lovers, siblings, or something else? The symbols hide as much as they reveal, don’t they? Editor: Absolutely. Clothes in photographs during this time often function like costumes, signaling class and respectability. That ornate dress and neatly kept suit offer insight into social aspirations and constructed identities. Their clothes shout what they could never reveal. Curator: Which brings to mind the gaze; she confronts the camera directly while he offers a half-smirk, more indirect, contemplative. Could this difference speak of roles within their relationship and within that society itself? The composition subtly pushes the viewer to question everything. Editor: And isn’t photography itself always a form of constructed memory? What traces of truth are being created here with the careful gesture and lighting to communicate specific ideas. When we look closely we read society, aspiration and culture etched into expression. Curator: That makes me wonder if Greiner’s artistry sought to immortalize them beyond mere physical likeness... capture an essence or spirit we might still access. Editor: Perhaps...and by contemplating such things, we connect with them across time—linking present eyes to past souls within a network of cultural echoes. The very act of noticing enlivens these portraits with our imagination once more. Curator: Exactly! The quiet immortality of being pondered… that thought makes my artist’s heart flutter.