painter(?), professional photographer, bookseller and publisher, son of Richard William Dwight and Anne, née Meade, worked in the London book trade until he migrated to Melbourne about 1855. He brought with him a consignment of second-hand books and soon opened a bookshop at 234 Bourke Street West. Dwight used these premises as a photographic studio for a short time, advertising in the Melbourne Directory of 1858 as a 'Daguerrean and Photographic artist’. In 1856 he had photographed the Salle de Valentino at the corner of Bourke and Spring streets, a popular place of entertainment in the early 1850s but by then 'a dilapidated old shed covered with election bills … and other placards’. In 1870 he published copies of this photograph, commended by the Argus 'not because the picture is a good one, but that it revives memories of scenes that can never be forgotten by those who witnessed them’. The photograph reappeared in the Australasian in September 1909 alongside a contemporary view taken from the same position.
Dwight’s bookshop became a focus for Melbourne’s literary circle and he published several books there during the 1860s. He exhibited three watercolours – Mount Macedon, Victoria , Botany Bay, the Landing Place of Cook and Port Jackson, North Head from Inner Lighthouse – at the Geelong Mechanics Institute in 1869. No artist was acknowledged in the catalogue and they may have been his own work. He died at his bookshop on 13 June 1871, leaving a widow Elizabeth, née Aldis-presumably a relative of W.H. Aldis , the Sydney tobacconist, and/or Albert Edward Aldis , who exhibited with the Victorian Artists’ Society in the 1890s.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
