Anonymous: Landscape with a woman with parasol, ca. 1907-1930, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam

For most of us, color photography only became a commonly used technique in the 1970s. It's hard to imagine that as early as 1861, a mere 22 years after the invention of photography itself, the first color photograph was taken by James Clark Maxwell. He used three separate images, each with a different color filter.
In 1903, the Lumière brothers patented a new process, called autochrome. The process required only one glass plate and the result was a slightly grainy color slide. The graininess and the not quite true to life colors rendered an impressionist effect. As photography was still struggling to gain recognition as an art form, many pictorialist photographers liked the new technology, despite the limited possibilities to manipulate the image to make it more 'artistic' (vice versa, many impressionist painters wanted to give their work a snapshot-like quality).
This work, taken by an anonymous photographer, might even fool you into thinking you're looking at an impressionist painting at first. The soft-toned, daily life image of a woman in a corn field has a relaxed atmosphere that reminds us of artists like Claude Monet.
The next posting will show additional examples of autochrome photographs. They make clear that pictorialist photographers were inspired by other painting genres as well, such as the Dutch Golden Age.