Robert Visser
Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Robert Visser (December 2, 1860 in Düsseldorf – 1937) was a merchant, photographer and collector of ethnographica.
Life
Robert Visser was the fifth of thirteen children in a Catholic family of merchants and seamen. Upon completing his education, Robert wanted to be a ship's captain. He signed up on a freight steamship in
Portuguese Congo
, from 1902 to 1904. By his own account, Visser was one of the first Europeans to establish coffee and cocoa plantations in these regions.
During his residence in Africa he collected a plenitude of ethnographica for the ethnographical museums in Berlin, Leipzig, and Stuttgart. Visser's name is linked primarily with Kongo "fetishes" (
minkisi, or power figures; sing. nkisi) that are now in various American (the Art Institute of Chicago, the Detroit Institute of Arts
) and German collections. Visser was not only a dedicated collector of ethnographica but also an avid photographer.
In April 1904 Visser returned to Germany and in 1905 married Selma Schobbenhaus, with whom he had a daughter, Sieglinde.
References
- Adler, Katrin and Stelzig, Christine (2002), Robert Visser and His Photographs from the Loango Coast, African Arts, Vol. 35, No. 4
- Geary, Christraud M., (2003), In and Out of Focus: Images from Central Africa, 1885–1960
- Alexander Massa, Relative of Robert Visser. (2017)
External links
Media related to Robert Visser at Wikimedia Commons
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