Bernardus Fredericus Aloysius Eilers (Amsterdam 1878-1951) received drawing education during his late teenager years, and learned about photography during a one year’s course chemigraphy in 1895/96 in Vienna. The eighteen-year old youngster must have been inspired by this hotspot for artistic photography, with many flourishing photographic studios at that time. In Amsterdam, he combined a career in reproduction photography (he reproduced work by Rembrandt in the Rijksmuseum, amongst other) with making pictorialist and modernist art photography in his leisure time. The studios he successively ran in Amsterdam were vivid meeting places for artists. He was a central figure in early 20th century Dutch art photography. Beside an excellent photographer himself, he made an effort for the improvement of art photography, by developing new printing procedures with the pictorialists, joining boards and juries of photographers associations, giving lectures on photography, founding a technical photography academy in 1948 and being part of the editorial board of the photography magazine Focus.

Along with Henri Berssenbrugge and Adriaan Boer, Bernard F. Eilers was one of the few Dutch pictorialist photographers who internationally could match the top photographers in other countries. Unlike many other art photographers of his era, he practised photography not only in his free time, but also professionally, albeit principally in photographic reproduction techniques. He also did a considerable amount of advertising photography on commission, for the Philips incandescent lamp factory in Eindhoven, among other clients, and shot reportage for the professional construction journal Het Bouwbedrijf and other magazines. His art photographs of street scenes, primarily in Amsterdam but also in other places in The Netherlands, show influences of 19th century realism and impressionism, while the sobriety and handling of light in his portraits reveals influence from 17th century Dutch painting, and particularly Rembrandt.