miniaturist, portraitist and professional photographer, is said to have worked for many years as an artist and photographer in Manchester, England. In Sydney she was employed as a photographic colourist for Edwin Dalton for 11 months before August 1864, then advertised that she would colour 'cartes de visite, locket miniatures, or large photographs’ at her Woollahra residence. The following month she advertised that she would also execute life-size 'crayon’ (pastel) portraits. On 20 December she announced that she had discontinued taking photographs at her home.
Early the following year William Bradley , Allen’s son by a previous marriage, also left Dalton’s and the pair joined Eliza’s husband Oswald Allen in his studio at 360 George Street. Eliza managed the artistic department, which included the production of pastel drawings and miniatures. In April 1868 her life-size pastel portrait of the Duke of Edinburgh exhibited at the gallery was praised for its sensitively-drawn face and avoidance of 'that offensive exactitude in the finish of dress &c., which is the glaring fault of some artists’. Prince Alfred was represented three-quarter face, seated 'as though he had just looked up from reading’.
In the 1867-68 Sands Sydney Directories, Oswald Allen advertised 'crayon portraits, large vignette heads, [and] highly finished miniatures’ in addition to photographs while William Bradley, who now had his own Pitt Street studio, offered locket miniatures and pastel portraits. In both cases much of the art work was almost certainly been done by Eliza Allen. Between 1869 and 1871 she and her husband were officially in partnership as 'artist photographers … Crayon Portraits and miniature painters’. They also offered to copy engravings, paintings and other works of art.
At the 1869 NSW Agricultural Exhibition Eliza Allen was awarded a prize for her 'crayon photographs’ – evidently a technique similar to Dalton’s 'crayographs’ (i.e. photographs on paper coloured with pastels). The Allens entered numerous varieties of coloured photographs in the 1870 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition and received two highly commended certificates for them. Various photographs were shown in the NSW annexe of the 1871 London International Exhibition: Heads of Ladies , a portrait of Miss Connolly overpainted in watercolour, large pastel portraits of Captain Towns, Miss Connolly and Miss Lynch, a head and shoulders photograph of the singer Miss Carandini and frames of photographs of the officers from the Duke of Edinburgh’s ship, the Galatea .
- Writers:
- Lennon, Jane
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 1992
