Between the end of the nineteenth century and the years between the two World Wars the young medium of photography had its first international movement: Pictorialism. Its central aspiration was to make photography into a form of art; the photographers sought to do this by concentrating on the extraordinary rendering of light and atmosphere. Through unusual photographic processes and printing techniques they achieved images with great expressive potential. In Atmospheric Light reveals how famous Dutch photographers including Henri Berssenbrugge, Adriaan Boer, Bernard Eilers and Berend Zweers also drew on their nation's traditions in painting from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Portraits with Rembrandtesque light, still lifes, landscapes and scenes of ordinary urban life were visualised anew by means of photography. The book includes a selection of over 100 of the most beautiful Pictorialist photographs from the Special Collections at the University of Leiden, and has been published to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam. ILLUSTRATIONS 3 colour 113 b/w illustrations
