A vintage nineteenth-century photograph of the General Post Office, Adelaide
An albumen paper photograph (158 × 208 mm), mounted on a card leaf detached from an album ('Captain Sweet's Views of South Australia' is printed in gilt within a decorative scroll on the recto); portion of the sky on the right-hand side a little mottled; the bottom edge of the mount has trifling surface loss; overall, in very good condition.
The photographer's credit and reference number ('Sweet | Adelaide | 90') is scratched in the negative. 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 #127214
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