Kabinet Hille is a private collection of nineteenth-century photography: cartes de visite, cabinet cards, complete albums, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes. The core of the collection consists of Dutch photography, with particular attention to Dutch colonial history in the Dutch East Indies, Suriname and the Antilles. In addition, the collection includes carefully selected foreign pieces that strengthen the whole.
Every piece in this collection is carefully documented: photographer or studio, estimated date, place of origin and condition. Kabinet Hille is not a shop, but an archive in the form of an online cabinet — intended to show, preserve and share this early photography with enthusiasts, researchers and collectors.
Some pieces in the collection are available on request. For questions about a specific piece, provenance or availability, please get in touch.
Maria Hille
Kabinet Hille takes its name from Maria Elisabeth Hille (1827–1893), the first professional female photographer in the Netherlands. From 1853 she ran her own studio — first in Groningen, from 1857 in The Hague — where she remained active as a portrait and architectural photographer until her death.
In 1858, commissioned by the city of Leiden, she produced the first Dutch photo album of architectural views, made on the occasion of the graduation of the Prince of Orange. That a woman photographed independently outdoors was far from self-evident at the time. Her pioneering work lies at the foundation of early Dutch photography and inspired the name of this cabinet.