Books and Arts;Artists and photographers;Point and paint

Unhampered by hefty equipment (the Kodak was held at waist level and had an arrow marked on top to help point the lens) or long exposures, Bonnard and his fellow painters from the Nabi group, Edouard Vuillard and Félix Vallotton, were among the first artists to use the camera to observe fine details, perspectives and light effects too fleeting to see with the naked eye. A painstakingly curated new show juxtaposes 220 mostly unpublished vintage snapshots by seven fin-de-siècle artists along with their paintings, prints and drawings in an effort to demonstrate how this new way of seeing inspired and expanded the painters' creative vision.

Henri Rivière, a French printmaker and designer, climbed the soaring Eiffel Tower before it was completed in 1889 to photograph the exhilarating lines and angles of its iron girders set against the Paris sky for a series of 36 lithographs. Vuillard and a gifted, yet little-known, Belgian painter named Henri Evenepoel used the camera as a sketch book and aide-mémoire to capture everyday moments with family and friends. Bonnard in turn photographed his slender, round-faced mistress and muse, Marthe de Méligny, naked in a glade, as inspiration for his illustrations of “Daphnis and Chloé” by a second-century Greek novelist and romancer, Longus.

Neither Vuillard nor Bonnard, with whom he shared a studio, actually copied photographs in their resonant, small-scale paintings of domestic interiors. Instead, both tried to replicate the immediacy of snapshots (or instantanés as they were called in France) often catching their subjects mid-gesture. Using his photographs only as an occasional reference point, or to reflect a mood, Vuillard recomposed his subjects at will. “At Table, Lunch” and “In Front of the Tapestry: Misia and Thadée Natanson” both show abbreviated figures, whether absorbed in eating a meal, or with their backs to the viewer. Vuillard's figures, who are almost swallowed up by the vibrant decor, have an apparitional quality that appealed to the 20th-century French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who described Vuillard and Bonnard as among the artists he most admired.

A Dutch painter, George Hendrik Breitner, also seizes a moment in time in a bustling Amsterdam street scene that is dominated by a veiled figure holding a fur muff up to her face, looking blurred and fugitive, as in real life. Now acknowledged as a gifted photographer in his own right, Breitner used his camera for “Girl in Red Kimono” (pictured right above with its photographic model, left). This precise yet atmospheric re-creation of his snapshot of a girl curled up on a divan, shows her intricately patterned kimono in sharp contrast with the design of the Persian carpet at her feet.

Unlike their official work, none of this exhibition's seven artists ever intended their photographs to go on public display. Photography, for them, was a mechanical process rather than an art form. Some of the images come from the attics and albums of the artists' families; Rivière's photographs, now at the Musée d'Orsay, were catalogued only in 1988. Vallotton, who left just 20 images, compared with 2,000 left by Vuillard, may even have destroyed the evidence following accusations that he copied a central figure from a photograph published in a French magazine in 1908. Snapshot studies for two of his paintings, “Beach at Etretat” and a portrait of his wife entitled “Red Room, Etretat”, show how he worked from photographs, eliminating extraneous details and grey shadows. He used this pared-down style to create powerful groups of figures or psychological portraits.

Vallotton and Vuillard liked to exchange photographs. Evenepoel, a pupil of Gustave Moreau who took almost 900 photographs, including a series of searching self-portraits, in the two years before he died of typhoid aged 27, described his camera as a “real gem”. A photograph of his hesitant family about to cross the Place de la Concorde recalls Edgar Degas's famous portrait of Vicomte Lepic and his daughters, while images of his cousin Louise de Mey and their son Charles embody the emotion he invested in his portraits.

“I savour them all [my snapshots] with the slightly sad joy of reflecting that all this good time is past”, Evenepoel wrote to his father in 1897. These images, like most in the exhibition, are startlingly small. But close inspection reveals a finely detailed portrait of how this group of artists lived and worked, and it conveys the real sense of the excitement they felt as they experimented with their seemingly miraculous new gadget.

“Snapshot: Painters and Photography 1888-1915” is at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, until January 8th 2012. It will be displayed at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, from February 4th until May 6th and at the Indianapolis Museum of Art from June 3rd until September 2nd.