professional photographer, brought the sennotype process to Australia from North America via Central and South America and China. He reached Melbourne early in 1862 and worked with Frederick Frith . Wilson claimed to own the Australian patent for the sennotype, a coloured photograph made by placing a waxed (transparent) albumen print on top of an identical untreated print and hand-colouring the result to produce a three-dimensional lifelike effect. When Frith independently announced the introduction of his 'chromo-sennotype’ process in August 1862, Wilson publicly stated that Frith had 'never obtained any of my chemical secrets, and the pictures which he and his brother [ Henry ] ... palm off on the public are not true sennotypes, but base imitations’.
F.S. Crawford of the Adelaide Photographic Company later stated that Wilson failed to patent his invention in Victoria in 1862 but toured the other Australian colonies selling the rights. When he introduced the process to New South Wales in 1863, the Sydney Morning Herald praised the finished product: 'The picture is invested with all the advantages of a miniature on ivory, combined with unfailing accuracy and unfading durability’. At Adelaide he sold the rights to Townsend Duryea , thus provoking Crawford’s Adelaide Photographic Company into advertising that there was nothing original or exclusive about the sennotype which, the firm claimed, had been described in the English Photographic Notes years earlier under the name Ivorytype. In Hobart Town, Wilson sold the rights to Alfred Bock , which predictably initiated another sequence of claims and counterclaims, this time between the Friths and Bock. No Australian sennotypes by Wilson are known, but Alfred Bock’s sennotype portrait of S.R. Fisher (1864, DL) has Wilson’s certificate giving Bock the right to the exclusive use of the process in Tasmania pasted on the back.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
