Vintage nineteenth-century photographs of Victoria Square, Adelaide (featuring the Supreme Court), and the city from Montefiore Hill, mounted back-to-back on a card leaf detached from an album
Albumen paper photographs (each approximately 157 × 207 mm), in fine condition; the mount has a few trifling blemishes.
The first photograph appears to be taken from the top of the (old) Treasury Building, looking south-west across the square at the imposing Supreme Court building, still extant. The second photograph is a panoramic view of the city skyline, centred on the towers of the Town Hall and the GPO; a tall chimney on the riverbank, pouring out black smoke, stands visually between them. Captain Samuel White Sweet (1825-1886), was a sea captain, surveyor and photographer: after he was censured when his ship ran aground in 1875, 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').
Item #127211
Price (AUD):
$550.00