While Heinrich Kühn was at the forefront of the Pictorialist movement in Vienna, Alfred Stieglitz was the single most important figure in American photography at the turn of the century. The international boundaries for Pictorialism were quite fluid. Kühn and Stieglitz maintained a friendship for many years and their photographs were exhibited together in Europe. Stieglitz published Kühn’s photographs in his journal Camera Work, including a special volume devoted entirely to his work. In 1906, Stieglitz dedicated an exhibition at his gallery to Kühn.

This portrait is printed using the oil pigment printing process, one of the techniques Kühn often employed to achieve an ‘artistic’ impression. The variations of the oil pigment process, which relied on the selective taking up of fatty inks or oil-based pigments by a selectively hardened gelatin layer, are difficult to distinguish from each other. It was made more difficult as the ink image was often transferred to a paper or tissue sheet. This example is almost certainly by the oil pigment process in which an inked-up gelatin relief was used to transfer the ink image to the paper tissue.