Item #116974 A vintage portrait photograph of Captain Samuel White Sweet (1825-1886, sea captain, surveyor and photographer). Captain Samuel White SWEET.

A vintage portrait photograph of Captain Samuel White Sweet (1825-1886, sea captain, surveyor and photographer)

An albumen paper print (approximately 130 × 72 mm), mounted on paper with a printed caption and border (external dimensions 171 × 118 mm).

The mount is a little cockled in the margins beyond the photograph; a tiny imperfection in the negative is visible in the top left-hand corner (well clear of the portrait proper); in excellent condition.

'In January 1869 Sweet took command of the two-masted schooner "Gulnare", which was later bought by the South Australian government for the Northern Territory survey expedition'. Between February 1869 and April 1872, he made five trips to the Northern Territory. 'In September [1870] in Darwin he photographed the official party at the ceremonial planting of the first pole of the overland telegraph; he also took pictures of the township, the men at work and forest scenery.' He spent the next three years as a master mariner based in Adelaide until 11 May 1875, when 'his ship the "Wallaroo", with his wife aboard, ran aground in a gale on Office Beach, Wallaroo. An inquiry attributed it to Sweet's error of judgment, and he was censured. He retired from the sea, opened a photographic studio in Adelaide and concentrated on landscapes. With his horse-drawn dark room he travelled through South Australia taking hundreds of skilful pictures of the outback, stations and homesteads. The colony's foremost documentary photographer of the 1870s, in the early 1880s he was one of the first to use the new dry-plate process' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). This plate has been removed from a copy of 'Notable South Australians' by George Loyau, published in Adelaide in 1885. The majority of copies we have inspected over the decades were not issued with a photograph of Sweet. A number of different portraits may be found; all may be presumed to be self-portraits, but the size and composition of this variant make it stand out.

Item #116974

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