[Adelaide]. [SWEET, Captain Samuel]

Photographic Views of Adelaide, South Australia. [Series] **

Adelaide, E.S. Wigg & Son, [1880s].

Duodecimo (170 × 113 mm), a cased leporello comprising 12 original albumen silver photographs (each approximately 95 × 150 mm) mounted on cards captioned and bordered in red, joined together with cloth hinges.

Blue cloth lettered and decorated in gilt, and decorated in black and blind; cloth lightly rubbed at the extremities; card mounts uniformly tanned; a near-fine example, with the contents in fine condition.

The views are mainly street scenes and public buildings; all of them are illustrated on our website. Three of the plates are signed in the negative 'Sweet | Adelaide' (albeit an attempt has been made in two of them to mask these details), and the balance of the photographs are almost certainly his work. We have a similar item in red cloth entitled 'Photographic Views of Adelaide, South Australia. Series II'; only two of the images are the same ('Rundle Street and The Arcade', and 'Coast Natives' Wurlie').

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').

'Coast Natives' Wurlie' was clearly taken at the same time as the scene in the frontispiece to Taplin's 'The Folklore, Manners, Customs, and Languages of the South Australian Aborigines', published in 1879, and illustrated with original photographs by Samuel Sweet.

Item #141137

Price (AUD): $800.00
other currencies