ATTRIBUTED TO G.R. LAMBERT & CO. — A CLASSIC VIEW OF PULAU BRANI

[att.] G. R. LAMBERT & Co.
A Malay ‘sea nomad’ village from St. James, Singapore.

Original late 19th-century albumen photograph, numbered ‘84’ in the negative, attributed to the Singapore-based studio G.R. Lambert & Co. Contemporary German manuscript caption in black ink beneath the image on the mount. Mounted back-to-back with a second albumen print (by Zangaki), showing the ship Sachsen at Suez. Both laid down on 19th-century green-tinted album card. Size: mount – 35.2 × 29.6 cm / Singapore photograph – 27.3 × 21.3 cm.

Condition

Very Good. A few faint spots of fading to sky and sea. Some minor edge chips to card mount (not affecting images). Tones remain excellent with fine detail and contrast. Please refer to gallery images or request a detailed condition report.

Context & Provenance

This atmospheric photograph was taken from the St. James promontory on Singapore Island, looking north toward the stilt village of Kampong Telok Saga on Pulau Brani. The view shows the wooden homes and jetty structures of the Orang Laut, the indigenous Malay ‘sea people’ who originally lived nomadically on boats in the Straits of Malacca and Riau Archipelago. By the late 19th century, they had settled in shore villages such as this one, building distinctive homes on stilts over the water.

The present image was part of a Boxer Rebellion-period travel album compiled by a German visitor to Asia and the Middle East. On the reverse is an unrelated but appealing photograph of the German ship Sachsen passing through the Suez Canal, captioned in the negative and in manuscript. A copy of the Malay village photograph is held by the National Museum of Singapore (accession no. 2007-50892), dated 1888. Sotheby’s also offered a similar print in 2015, dated slightly earlier (1860s–70s), and included in a compiled album of Lambert photographs.