Vintage nineteenth-century photographs of the City Bridge across the River Torrens on King William Road, and a view along the same stretch of road (looking south from North Adelaide), mounted back-to-back on a card leaf detached from an album
Albumen paper photographs (each approximately 157 × 207 mm); the road scene has been printed from a broken negative, and a hairline crack and small fingerprint are visible in the central portion of the sky; the top margin of the mount on this side has some spots of residual glue, and the bottom edge of the mount on the other side has a few trifling surface chips; overall, the condition is excellent.
The photographer's credit and reference number ('Sweet | Adelaide | 335') is scratched in the negative of the City Bridge (the second bridge built over the Torrens at that spot, in 1877). Oarsmen in four boats in the foreground have clearly paused for the event, as have the numerous pedestrians on the bridge. The second photograph shows Adelaide's twin towers - the Town Hall and the GPO - in the distance, but the most prominent features of the scene are the tall eucalypts lining the road, and the cart-horses drinking at a shaded trough. 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 #127216
Price (AUD):
$400.00