In the 1880s photography was revolutionized because of new, hand-held cameras. Famous French painters as Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis and Édouard Vuillard and in the Netherlands George Hendrik Breitner and Willem Witsen photographed profusely for many years. These painter-photographers sometimes used photographs as a preparatory study or reference for their paintings, in the same way they had previously used sketches. But they also used the camera to record intimate family scenes. While these artists chose the same subjects as the run-of-the-mill amateur with no artistic training, their images stood out for their compositions, betraying their painterly background. In this study the French and Dutch painter-photographers are compared for the first time and their work is placed in a wider context. The Manfred & Hanna Heiting Fund enables young researchers to study photography in the archives of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and publish their results in the series Rijksmuseum Studies in Photography.