Treasures of pre-cinema history 

...in the South of Germany. The Augsburg publishing houses had business contacts throughout Europe. One of their customers were Savoyards from Switzerland or France which bought vue d'optique prints - Guckkastenblätter - for their peepshow-boxes.

Beside the graphic industry, Augsburg was in the 18th century a major centre for paintings behind glass (Hinterglasmalerei), particular with religious motives. Much has been written about behind glass painting, but one important subject was overlooked. A hand-painted magic lantern-slide is of course a painting behind glass. The famous Augsburg scientific instrument workshops like Cosmos Conrad Cuno or Georg Friedrich Brander manufactured magic lanterns and offered slides from the glass painting workshops in their neighbourhood.

As the Savoyards were known to give magic lantern shows, Augsburg glass painters offered them magic lantern-slides. For many reasons, this was no surprise. On the one hand, the complete infrastructure for painting lantern slides was available, on the other hand, the customer structures was already in place. The magic lanterns were supplied by forgotten workshops like Niklas Besserer or Berkenstein.

Magic lantern slides from Augsburg can be recognized by a typical "Augsburger Farbhaltung", a specific Augsburg colour scheme, which was blue, brownish and in the composition a light salmon colour predominates. The outlines were painted in a red-brown colour before the motif was coloured by hand. In the projection, the outlines appear in black.