Hand-Colored Photographs: The Color Came After the Picture

In this corner of a Rijksmuseum album print, a stroke of violet trails sideways across the leaves. The camera did not put it there. Someone added it by hand to the finished photograph. The stroke follows the outline of no flower.

That is what a hand-colored photograph is: a picture made in one color, with color added afterward by hand. It is not color photography. An 1872 manual for tintype makers says the plate was colored once it was dry, and that ordinarily only the cheeks and lips were tinted.

What is a hand-colored photograph?

The whole print shows an iris garden at Horikiri in Tokyo, titled on the print “Iris Flowers Horikiri Tokio.” The Rijksmuseum dates it about 1870 to about 1900 and names the photographer only as anonymous, Tokyo. It is one of 50 photographs of sights in Japan in a single album. The museum’s record calls the technique an albumen print and describes the object as an “ingekleurde albuminedruk”: a colored albumen print, in this site’s translation.

Look how little of it carries strong color. The sky has a pale wash and the leaves a thin green; the lanterns are red, the parasol is blue, and the violet sits in patches on the flower beds. Where no wash lies, you see the brownish tone of the photograph underneath. The color is a second layer, laid over a picture that already existed.

Color in this sense is a finish, like varnish. An 1872 manual describes tintypes the same way: the plate came out of the camera in one color, and coloring was a later job at a work table. The tintype entry shows one of those plates, a hand-colored portrait from a Boston studio.

What did an 1872 manual say about coloring?

Edward M. Estabrooke’s The Ferrotype, and How to Make It (1872) was written for people who made tintypes, which he calls ferrotypes. On p. 60 it describes a work table by a stove, where plates were dried, colored and varnished. His order is plain: “The plate when dry is to be colored or tinted” (p. 60).

He names one color for faces: “the color best adapted for the face is Indian Red,” with “a small portion of silver white” mixed in. Then the cheeks and lips were colored, and a soft brush called a blender took off the extra color, softened its outlines and blended it off “to the white of the picture.”

About a hundred pages later he repeats the point more strongly (p. 159). “All Ferrotypes are, or should be, colored or tinted,” he says, and the color was a dry powder put on with a soft brush. “Ordinarily only the cheeks and lips are tinted,” and that “takes but a few moments.” Only after the coloring were the pictures varnished.

Keep the scope in mind. These are one manual’s instructions for one kind of photograph, written for working tintype makers. They show what one 1872 handbook expected a finished ferrotype to look like, but they do not tell you how any particular studio, in Tokyo or anywhere else, colored its prints.

How can you tell a photograph was colored by hand?

Hold the print up to the light and check three things. Each one is only a clue.

• Color that ignores outlines. The violet stroke in the opening detail runs sideways over the leaves instead of following a flower’s outline. A brush can miss an edge, so a stroke that follows no outline hints that the color came later.
• Detail showing through the color. On the parasol, the dark ribs and the shading of the canopy are part of the photograph. The blue lies on top of them, thin enough to see through.
• A few flat colors. Here the blue, the violet, the pink and the red each sit in even patches, with no shading of their own beyond what the photograph already had.

None of these settles the question alone: a faded print or a later reproduction can fool the eye, and this site does not judge a process from looks. The record is the evidence. For this print, the museum’s own description says colored. The same caution holds for the backs of cards, from the stereograph to the real photo postcard: each clue dates only what it can show, and color shows that someone worked on the print, not when the picture was taken.

How many hand-colored photographs does the Rijksmuseum list?

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A search of the Rijksmuseum’s collection data for photographs whose technique includes inkleuren (coloring) returned 72 records on November 12, 2026. This site’s count read every one.

The 55 from Japan are all albumen prints, catalogued as 1851 to about 1900 or about 1870 to about 1900, and 50 of them are numbered RP-F-00-5372-1 to RP-F-00-5372-50. So one numbered group makes up most of the count. Among records with a narrow date, the earliest is a colored daguerreotype of 1852–1858 and the latest a gelatin silver print of about 1965–1975, both from the United States.

The other 17 records show how widely the practice turns up in this one collection. They include a colored stereo card from France, dated about 1855 to 1865, and three albumen prints from Rotterdam and Amsterdam, made between 1858 and about 1875. There are glass slides of about 1907 to 1935 from Switzerland, Sweden and Schaumburg, and a carte de visite of 1899 published by H. Hollenkamp & Co. in Amsterdam. Two gelatin silver prints from Germany, dated 1890 to 1920, are described as colored with yellow paint.

Treat 72 as a floor, not a total. RP-F-F01206-H, the print at the top of this page, is not among them: its technique field says only albumen print, and the coloring is mentioned in the description. Three other prints with the same number stem, RP-F-F01206-AB, -AF and -W, are in the set.

Download the Rijksmuseum colored-photograph counts (CSV) · source and license notes

Is machine colorization the same thing?

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No. Hand coloring is part of the object. On a tintype it sits between the picture and the varnish, put there by someone working on that plate. It can fade or rub off, but it belongs to the object’s history, and a museum can describe it.

Machine colorization of a scan adds nothing to the object. The colors appear on a screen copy. They are the software’s guesses about what was there. This site treats that as a rewrite of the picture, not a restoration: it covers the physical evidence of a print with a guess.

Film had its own hand color. Kodak’s 1918 handbook on tinting and toning notes that toned film could also be tinted in places, the color applied “either by hand with a brush, or by stencilling” (p. 29). Most of the handbook covers something else, film run through dye baths and toning baths in tanks and racks: that is the subject of tinting and toning.