DURYEA, Townsend

'Duryea's Adelaide Album' [cover title]

[Adelaide, Townsend Duryea, circa 1866].

A photograph album (254 × 340 mm), containing a magnificent panorama of Adelaide, comprising five roughly uniform albumen paper photographs mounted as issued (slightly overlapping) to form a continuous image (124 × 880 mm) on a linen-backed card mount (244 × 951 mm, folded into three), plus 12 albumen paper photographs (nine of them around 130 × 200 mm or the reverse, one 130 × 172 mm, and the last two approximately 220 × 285 mm) mounted on the rectos of stiff card leaves.

Original russet pebble-grain cloth lettered in gilt on the front cover; cloth slightly flecked, with minor wear to the extremities; endpapers foxed, with slight loss to silverfish (and the rear free endpaper is missing); leading edge ribbon ties appear never to have been inserted; mounts lightly cockled, and occasionally lightly spotted and foxed; bottom margin of the final mount lightly stained, with trifling loss to silverfish; minimal signs of age and use; overall, a very pleasing copy, with the photographs - and in particular, the stunning panorama - in uniformly fine condition.

The twelve individual photographs are captioned in pencil on the mounts: 'View in botanical gardens - showing Asylum', 'View in Botanical Gardens', 'View in Gardens', five captioned simply 'Botanical Gardens', 'Bridge between N & S Adelaide', 'near Willunga', and two captioned 'Willunga' (both superb large-format prints).

New York-born Townsend Duryea (1823-1888) emigrated to Australia (Melbourne) in 1852, and commenced work as a photographer the following year. In 1855, he relocated his studio to Adelaide. By the early 1870s Duryea's panoramas, royal portraits and prizes won in Society of Arts photographic competitions had made him famous ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). Much more detail on Duryea may be had from the lengthy article in Joan Kerr's 'Dictionary of Australian Artists ... to 1870'. However, the panorama in this album is not the one described in Kerr ('a fold-out 360-degree panorama of Adelaide taken from the tower of Adelaide Town Hall in 1865 was the album's major feature'), nor is it the larger panorama 'taken from the top of the GPO tower soon after it was completed in 1870'. The present panorama is taken from a local rise in North Adelaide and sweeps left to right from the hills towards the sea. All of these panoramas are very rare indeed, not least because 'Duryea's studio and enormous collection of glass-plate negatives, stated to number 50 000, were destroyed by fire in 1875'. This catastrophe effectively ended Duryea's career as a photographer. It must assuredly account for the genuine scarcity of material by Duryea on the open market (other than bread-and-butter carte de visite portraits).

This album is very rare in our experience (and if the available records are any guide, for long before we came on the scene in the mid-1970s). Although this is the fourth example we have handled, it is also only the fourth one we have seen on the open market in that time. We have inspected three other examples in institutions; all seven copies are bound similarly, and contain the same panorama. However, the balance of the contents varies in quantity and image selection in each instance.

Duryea began to advertise these albums in Adelaide newspapers in August 1866. One such, from the 'South Australian Register' for 28 August 1866 reads: 'DURYEA'S VIEW ALBUMS. These Albums are neatly bound in cloth, and form a beautiful acquisition either for the drawing-room table or transmission home. A PANORAMIC VIEW of the CITY of ADELAIDE and the SUBURBS, three feet in length, has been introduced as a Frontispiece; and as a further advantage purchasers have the privilege of choosing Photographs from a large Album, containing 90 of the most interesting and picturesque Views of Adelaide and the Country. The above are open to the inspection of the public at Mr. Duryea's Studio, 66 and 68, King William-street. Any of the Views mentioned above can be had separately. Photographs of Gentlemen's Country Seats, Business Offices, Shops, &c., taken at the shortest notice by Ross's Improved Wide Angle Lens'.

Provenance: Edwin Ashby (1861-1941), South Australian property developer and naturalist; by descent. While Ashby was obviously not the first owner of this album, its numerous images of the Botanical Gardens must have appealed to him. The fine gardens he established at his property 'Wittunga' at Blackwood in the Adelaide hills after the turn of the century were later donated to the State by his heirs, and are now the Wittunga Botanic Garden.

Item #141595

Price (AUD): $18,000.00
other currencies