An album of photographs of South Australia, produced in 1875 by Freeman & Wivell, Photographers
Adelaide, Freeman & Wivell, Photographers, [1875].
An elephant folio photograph album (640 × 545 mm), containing 20 large-format albumen paper photographs (approximately 270 × 360 mm) mounted on the rectos of stiff card leaves; although there are numerous stubs bound in, close inspection indicates that no album leaves or plates have been removed.
Contemporary half leather and cloth with a large leather title label ('Philadelphia Exhibition: Photographs from South Australia') on the front cover; both joints a little split at the foot of the spine; covers lightly worn and a little marked; endpapers a little marked and discoloured; the margins of the first mount are foxed and a little marked, with occasional light foxing to a few other mounts; trifling signs of handling; overall, the album and contents are in very good condition, albeit some of the photographs are light on contrast, and one ('Parliament House') is a poorly-produced print. The front flyleaf is inscribed 'LHB from JPB Xmas / 10'; the price of £2/2/0 pencilled on the pastedown suggests the item entered the secondary market a long time ago.
The contents are: 1 Government House and Grounds; 2 Post Office and Town Hall [looking south along King William Street]; 3 General Post Office; 4 Town Hall; 5 Club House [Adelaide Club, North Terrace]; 6 Local Court; 7 St Peter's Cathedral [under construction]; 8 National Bank, King William Street; 9 Town Hall and Eagle Chambers; 10 Parliament House; 11 Supreme Court; 12 Rundle Street, south corner [J. Moss, Temple of Fashion]; 13 Imperial Buildings; 14 Institute; 15 Grenfell Street: South-West Corner and 'Register' Office; 16 Bank of Australasia; 17 Hindley Street, north corner [Howell & Son, Stationers]; 18 Parkside Lunatic Asylum; 19 Model Schools; 20 Advertiser Buildings. All photographs are surrounded by a gilt-ruled border, with the captions in gilt below the border; 'Freeman & Wivell, Photographers' is printed in gilt in smaller letters immediately underneath the plate in all but three instances (numbers 6, 10 and 15). George John Freeman (1842-1895) was active as a photographer in Adelaide from the early 1860s. 'From 1872, Freeman's Adelaide-based business was called "The Melbourne Photographic Company"; Edward Wivell [1833-1909] is thought to have been a partner in the studio between c.1875 and 1878. The dissolution of the partnership was announced ... in December 1878' ('A Century in Focus: South Australian Photography, 1840s-1940s', page 92, footnote 6). An article in the South Australian 'Register' (1 October 1875), under the headline 'Views of Adelaide' is informative: 'The Melbourne Photographic Company have just completed, to the order of the South Australian Commissioner for the Philadelphia Exhibition, a very large, clear, and faithful panoramic view of Adelaide, taking in nearly all the prominent public buildings.... This photograph is about 12 feet long by two feet in width, and gives, when taken with the companion picture, six feet in length, a correct idea of the extent of the city.... The Company have also a number of excellent photographs separately, representing the finest buildings in the city. These are to accompany the larger pictures, and the whole collection will doubtless do much towards creating a just impression of Adelaide'. No examples of these two panoramas have been located to date. We have located three other examples of the album: the National Library of Australia has an album containing 21 plates, and the State Library of SA and the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide each has an album containing 29 plates. An online article by Lee Hayes about the BSL album notes that 'The State Library digitised both its own copy of the album, plus ours, and uploaded to its website' the better version of each print. Comparison with these digitised images shows that the nine plates not included in our album tend to be of less impressive buildings (or groups of buildings), or of buildings at a distance, and would appear to have been left out by design. Elspeth Pitt, in her perceptive commentary on one of these images ('Bank of Australasia') in 'A Century in Focus' (the catalogue to the important exhibition of the same name held at the Art Gallery of SA in 2007), has this to say: 'While contemporaneous criticism of Freeman's work has been difficult to locate, the South Australian Commissioner in Paris remarked: "[it] is the clear atmosphere that makes them so beautiful". Indeed, while the composition of this image and of others in the Philadelphia portfolio may be simple - they are architectural portraits, not evocative streetscapes - their low-lying perspectives silhouette the buildings against the sky, making them appear both stark and monumental.... he was renowned for his large-scale architectural views, which, in addition to Philadelphia, were exhibited at the Paris Exposition Universelle Internationale of 1878 and the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880'.
Item #126824
Sold