Chess photos from Dutch National Archives

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Christopher Kreuzer
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Chess photos from Dutch National Archives

Post by Christopher Kreuzer » Sat Feb 06, 2021 7:11 am

In another thread, stumbled across a nice collection of chess photos from the Dutch National Archives - are these new or are chess historians generally aware of that resource?

Nice collection of chess photos here, part of a wider collection donated to Wikimedia Commons from the Dutch National Archives, see here, total of 415,851 images, so might be worth looking at the chess-related ones, somehow. This search brings up 1769 photos.

As far as I can tell, most of them uploaded in September 2020 and later (i.e. uploaded as public domain to Wikimedia Commons). Not sure when they were scanned at the Dutch National Archives. Some nice ones (e.g. Korchnoi) in what inevitably includes a mixed bunch of obscure/unknown chess players.

To search the Dutch National Archives photo collections direct, go here. Not sure if you have to search using Dutch or English keywords. (Dutch, e.g. schaak, though searching by player names also works.)

Kevin Thurlow
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Joined: Wed Apr 30, 2008 12:28 pm

Re: Chess photos from Dutch National Archives

Post by Kevin Thurlow » Sat Feb 06, 2021 9:47 am

Great collection! Nice to see a young Alex Jongsma, but I note Theo van Scheltinga didn't seem to change his appearance much from 1950 - 1980. There was a picture of England - Belgium presumably from an Olympiad, and foreground looked like Alexander vs O'Kelly, but not sure who was behind them.