At the end of a recent trip to Austria, my family made a stop in Heidelberg, Germany for a night. We stayed at the Hotel Rose, which caters to the American military both in terms of its accommodations and its decor. One of the most fascinating decorations was this picture from 1911, featuring the river Neckar, the “Old Bridge,” and several important military types:

What I realized quickly after noticing it was the people clearly weren’t sitting on the bank of the river. In fact, it looks like this picture is actually composed of about 24 separate photographs taken in a studio, which led me to wonder just how the photographs were integrated into the obviously painted landscape. My guess: the photos were glued to a canvas, the canvas was photographed, then an artist painted the landscape on top of the composite photograph.

My theory of how this picture was created reminds me a lot of matte painting, a technique used in movies to create grandiose settings without having to physically build them. When was matte painting first used? 1911. So perhaps this picture used lessons learned from the early days of that technique.

Could we do something more convincing in Photoshop? Of course, but the stylization and attention to detail in this picture lends it a certain beauty that I don’t believe would be eclipsed by the realism of a Photoshop composite.