Jacobus Anthonie Meessen

Jacobus Anthonie Meessen (Dutch pronunciation: [jaːˈkoːbʏs ɑnˈtoːni ˈmeːsə(n)]; 5 December 1836 – 14 November 1885) was a Dutch photographer who took more than 250 portraits and landscapes of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) between 1864 and 1870. Born to a carpenter in Utrecht, Meessen worked in that trade in the Indies before marrying in the Netherlands in the early 1860s. He returned to the colony in 1864, intent on documenting its land and people. He worked mostly in the capital of Batavia (now Jakarta), Java, and Padang, Sumatra; he also photographed Bangka, Belitung, Borneo, and Nias.

When Meessen returned to the Netherlands in 1870, he established a short-lived partnership with Abraham Vermeulen and began disseminating his photographs. Selected images were given to King William III in an elaborately decorated album in 1871, while more were published by De Bussy in 1875 and exhibited in Paris and Amsterdam. In his final years, Meessen worked predominantly as an architect. Collections of his albumen prints, some of which were hand-tinted or annotated, are held in four institutions in the Netherlands.