Eduard Isaac Asser

Eduard Asser (Amsterdam, 1809 – 1894) was a Dutch lawyer who, alongside a successful legal career, pursued photography as an amateur. His financial position allowed him to afford a hobby that was very expensive at the time. He is considered the father of photography in the Netherlands. He trained under the painter Jan Adam Kruseman.

His first experiments with the daguerreotype reproduced academic art. His main interest was making photographic printing cheaper, and in 1858 he patented the Procédé Asser, a photolithography process. He served as an editor of a Dutch photography magazine and was a member of the Amsterdam photographers' society Helios.

Besides using studio techniques for still lifes, he often photographed his family, most notably a childhood portrait of Tobias Asser. In 1993 his descendants gave the national collection around 200 of his earliest photographs, dating from 1839 to 1860, which have been kept in the Rijksmuseum ever since.