Three years after his first foray into cinema, the American and British Mutoscope Company became Thomas Edison's biggest adversary notably thanks to the use of Mutoscopes, slot machines allowing you to view short films.

At a time when film manufacturers weren't very fond of travelling, preferring to wait for topical events to come to them, the American Mutoscope Company sent cameramen abroad to immortalise places unrecognised by the general public. So in the company's archives you can find films like Friedrichstrasse filmed in Berlin and Place de la Concorde filmed in Paris.

From 1897 the company started to create subsidiaries abroad and thus became the first multinational in the history of cinema. This is how the Dutch branch Dutch Mutoscope Company was created after the success of a film about the coronation of Queen Wilhelmina filmed in Holland in 1898. That same year, the parent company in the United States of America thus decided to send William Dickson (1860-1935), former cameraman for Edison, to direct new films for the Dutch subsidiary. Emile Lauste (1880-1946), future pioneer of sound cinema, was also sent from London to shoot some materials in the Netherlands.

Lauste came twice to the Netherlands, first visiting Amsterdam and Haarlem at the beginning of June. In Haarlem, he shot pictures during the visit of the Hague Peace Conference delegations. The second time that Lauste visited the Netherlands was in september 1899. During both visits, Lauste also produced some local movies. For example of children's plays at the picturesque island of Marken and of the mills on the border of the river Zaan near Amsterdam.

Prinsengracht is part of a big collection of about 250 films on 68mm stock, which have been preserved and restored in the 1990s by the Nederlands Filmmuseum and the BFI (British Film Institute) through duplication onto 35mm safety stock.

The original music for this film was composed by Martin de Ruiter in 2009.