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painter, scene-painter and professional photographer, was born in Offenbach, Germany. The family claimed he was a cousin of the composer Richard Wagner. Conrad Wagner and his wife Katherine Wilhelmina, née Theut {or Thent? See Clarence River Historical Society, who had married at Frankfurt, came to New South Wales aboard the Ceasar Goddefroy [sic acc. Clarence River Hist Socy], arriving at Grafton on 31 March 1856. At the 1861 Industrial Exhibition at the Maitland School of Arts he showed a pencil sketch of the Bank of New South Wales at Tinbarra Tableland (drawn that year) and was criticised for depicting a building 'more like an old gunyah than a bank’. For ten years from the early 1860s Wagner worked as a painter and photographer at a studio in Prince Street, Grafton, advertising cartes-de-visite 'tastefully shaded off around’ and portraits: 'if large size really artistically finished’. He also claimed that 'being in constant communication with his relations some of whom are notorious in Photography on the continent – he is enabled to keep steps with the latest improvements in this science’ – advertisements that suggest he never fully came to terms with the English language. He always retained strong ties with the German community, was Secretary of the Grafton German Club and a member of the Glen Innes committee formed to assist German victims of the Franco-Prussian War.

Wagner’s oil copy of Murillo’s Ascension was judged to have 'merit of a character rarely seen from the brush of an artist sojourning in a provincial portion of Australia’ when it was shown in Sydney. He lived in Sydney and worked with the photographer Henry Goodes from at least June to October 1863, being cited in the Sydney Morning Herald in October as the designer, with Goodes the photographer, of a Royal Marriage souvenir containing portraits of the Prince and Princess of Wales surmounted by the arms of the Prince and the maiden escutcheon of the Princess. In the same month it was reported that Wagner had painted a watercolour copy of Lessing’s picture of Ezzelin da Romana, the Tyrant of Padua, after the original seen in the Frankfurt Gallery before his migration.

Presumably the apprentice Wagner had taken on in 1863, John William Lindt , was temporarily looking after the Grafton studio. In the early 1870s the studio won a considerable reputation for photographs of the Aborigines of the Clarence River district, which Wagner sold both locally and abroad, but these were taken by Lindt, by then a partner and soon sole proprietor. Wagner moved to Glen Innes about 1872 soon after Lindt had married his daughter, Anna Maria Dorothea, and moved to Melbourne.

Always more interested in painting than photography, Wagner produced watercolours, pastels and oil paintings as well as painting over enlarged photographs. His speciality was posthumous portraits. In 1866 a letter from Henry Pinchin of Singleton thanked Wagner for the oil portrait of his late son, James, which 'pleased his mother very much … and during the week numerous friends and acquaintances have called to see the work and have one and all pronounced it to be a thorough life-like portrait of him’. A painted photograph of 'the departed child of a well-known [Grafton] townsman’ was celebrated as 'an indisputable triumph of the artist’s ability’. Yet in 1875 an article in the Grafton Argus which praised his posthumous portrait of a townsman, Maurice O’Keefe, stated that 'it is a matter of wonder that the wealthier classes of our community do not avail themselves of Mr. Wagner’s skill’, and his art obviously appealed mainly to the working and lower middle classes.

Few extant works have been identified but his pair of gouache portraits apparently painted over photographic enlargements of Johann Georg and Magdalena Lollbach (both 1869, Mitchell Library) and a portrait of Rev. A.E. Selwyn (1867, Clarence River Historical Society) are primitive and wooden likenesses that do nothing to confirm Wagner’s contemporary reputation. Cornwall Park, Grafton, Residence of S. Avery Esq. (1859, private collection), showing the newly-wed Mrs Harry Smith, née Mary Ann Avery , aged seventeen, leaving her parents’ home with her husband, is more stylish, though equally naïve. His portrait of the then Colonial Secretary, John Robertson (later Sir John, Premier of New South Wales), was commissioned by a group of free selectors on the Clarence, Richmond and Tweed rivers and presented to Mrs Robertson by the mayor of Grafton on behalf of the subscribers on 5 May 1871. It depicted Robertson 'in an easy, sitting posture’ holding a copy of his much-admired Land Act (the reason for the tribute). The frame was by Benjamin Waters of Pitt Street.

Wagner continued to work as a photographer after he moved to Glen Innes until 1875 when he was declared bankrupt, his liabilities being assessed as £63 16s, his assets at £15 (including £10 for his photographic apparatus which sold, alas, for £2). 'I have been following the business of photographic art in Glen Innes aforesaid for some years past’, he declared, 'but have been unable to earn more than was barely necessary for my maintenance and support’. He was again listed as a photographer – of Grey Street, Glen Innes – in 1883-91, having apparently worked as a portrait and scene painter in the interim.

He was celebrated in Glen Innes as 'our local Raphael’, but his success both as a painter and painter-photographer remained provincical (he was never Lindt’s equal as a photographer) despite a couple of illustrious admirers: Marcus Clarke and Henry Kendall. The Mitchell Library’s copy of Kendall’s Poems and Songs , published by J. R. Clarke at Sydney in 1862, is inscribed to Wagner 'From his Friend, The Author’, and the library also holds a copy of Kendall’s manuscript poem, 'Waiting on the raft. Suggested by a scene in the great Clarence flood [February] 1863 painted by Conrad Wagner Esq.’ in which Wagner is invoked as 'Painter-Poet’. The oil painting that inspired Kendall’s tribute, which shows a family stranded on a raft at the height of the flood (Clarence River Historical Society), was his best-known painting, being reproduced in the Illustrated Melbourne Post on 24 October 1863.

Many years later Wagner returned the compliment, flanking the central allegorical figures of Britannia and Australia in his proscenium decoration for a newly erected theatre beside Tattersall’s Hotel in Glen Innes with portraits of Shakespeare, Byron, Macready, Creswick, Marcus Clarke and Kendall. The drop-scene had more local heroes – members of the local regiment to the Sudan Wars and the drill instructor of the Glen Innes Volunteers – although the rest of the scenery was more conventional European landscapes and interiors. He also painted scenery for the Scone School of Arts and for a local Masonic Hall (date and location unknown). Indeed, he seems to have catered for theatrical productions throughout the district. He spent two months on scenery for a new Oxford Music Hall in a neighbouring town, choosing a series of Swiss landscape and genre scenes as his subjects along with a group representing 'the artist’s ideal – an English and German officer arm-in-arm’.

Wagner died on 1 August 1910, said to be aged ninety-two, and was interred in the Church of England Cemetery at Waverley, Sydney. Described as a genial artist, 'the quintessence of politeness [who] wears the orthodox cap, and smokes the equally orthodox long-stem pipe’, his son remarked that he was the epitome of Kendall’s painter-poet, and an impractical businessman.

Writers:

Lennon, Jane

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989