Vintage nineteenth-century photographs of the Bank of South Australia and the Royal Adelaide Hospital, 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 Bank of South Australia building still stands on King William Street, Adelaide. The photographer's credit and reference number ('Sweet | Adelaide | 92') is scratched in the negative. The imposing hospital buildings, now demolished, are photographed from an elevated vantage point (probably the roof of the Botanic Hotel across North Terrace), and the wide-angled view shows a sparsely-developed city now lost to history. The reference to Sweet was painted out in the original negative before this print was made, suggesting it may be a posthumous print. 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 #127218
Price (AUD):
$550.00