The collection assembled by the Dutch physician H. J. Vinkhuijzen (1843-1910) consists of over 32,000 diverse pictures from varied sources of costumes mounted in 762 scrapbooks. Elaborate 19th-century European uniforms are the collection's special strength.
The aesthetic quality of the images varies, as the collection includes 17th-century festival book prints, 19th-century chromolithographs, original watercolor compositions, pencil drawings, and photographs. Most are plates extracted from illustrated books and magazines. Dr. Vinkhuijzen colored some of the printed images and when printed images were lacking drew others by hand.
In general, the pictures are organized by country and time period. The many scrapbooks devoted to Germany and Italy include separate designations for pre-unification states and principalities. Mexico and some other Latin American countries are also represented, but there is no coverage of the United States.
Biographical/historical: Dr. Vinkhuijzen traveled throughout Europe as a physician associated with various armies and with the Dutch royal court. He earned a doctor of medicine degree in the mid-1860s. The 1860s also saw the appearance of his four known professional publications on Dutch medicine, leprosy, syphilis, and the compound eyes of insects. He began his career as a medical officer with the Royal Sharpshooters Corps in The Hague. During the Franco-Prussian War he served in France on an ambulance with the newly founded Red Cross. He also traveled to Russia, where he stayed in Moscow studying "the fight against pestilence." In his later life, he was the official court physician to Prince Alexander of the Netherlands. His father had performed in the same role for King Willem III.
Content: Biographical sketch based on documents bound with an inventory entitled Uniformes de toutes les nations et de toutes les epoques formée M. le Dr. H. J. Vinkhuyzen (Amsterdam ... 1910). These sources provide minimal information and no articles on Dr. Vinkhuijzen appear in the authoritative national biographical dictionaries published in the Netherlands. From one of the documents: "Of course he was highly thought of in spite of his curious hobbies, one of which was his collecting plates of military uniforms for which he ruined even the most wonderful and expensive works."
Content: Various forms of the name occur. "Vinkhuijzen" is the use authenticated by the Library of Congress.
