Family Album Page with Eva Boelen - Charlotte Alida Boelen-Matthes

A 1912 archival album page featuring candid photographs of Eva Boelen in Aerdenhout and a tourist carriage in Hamburg.

This archival document presents a page from a personal photograph album, capturing domestic life in the early twentieth century. The composition features four distinct photographic prints mounted on a grey card backing, a common method for preserving family memories during the Edwardian era. The images focus on Eva Boelen, the daughter of the photographer, during her infancy in Aerdenhout.

In the upper left, a mother and child appear at a window, while the lower left and upper right frames show the child in a small wooden cart on a terrace. The lower right image depicts the child sitting in a garden, engaged in the simple act of picking a daisy. These domestic scenes provide a window into the private sphere of a Dutch family, documenting the growth of a child within the comfort of a garden setting.

Centrally positioned is a larger, vertical photograph depicting a horse-drawn carriage filled with tourists in Hamburg. This image, annotated as a sightseeing tour, offers a contrast to the quietude of the garden scenes. The inclusion of this travel photograph alongside the family portraits reflects the habit of documenting both daily life and leisure travel within a single volume. The handwritten annotations in Dutch provide context for the locations and subjects, identifying the grandmother, Eva Boelen-Smidt van Gelder, and the specific dates of the photographs.

As a historical object, this album page preserves the aesthetic of early amateur photography. The use of octagonal cut-outs for the prints creates a decorative arrangement on the page. The sepia-toned gelatin silver prints retain their original clarity, offering a view into the social habits and personal narratives of the Boelen-Matthes family. This piece is an example of how personal archives function as records of individual history, capturing the intersection of family life and the broader world.