Design and Art Australia Online

painter, engraver, lithographer and professional photographer, came from Scotland to Victoria in the early gold-rush years. He may be the 'A.’ Calder of Bendigo catalogued as painting and exhibiting View on the Clyde at the 1854 Melbourne Exhibition, and he was certainly resident in the colony by 1856, when he exhibited Portrait of a Lady in the Victorian Exhibition of Art as a professional painter of Dryburgh Street, North Melbourne. His oil View in the Australian Pyrenees shown at the 1861 Victorian Exhibition was sent on to the 1862 London International Exhibition.

In 1863 John Calder was in partnership with the photographer Charles Nettleton . They advertised engraving, lithography, portrait and landscape painting and photography from their studio at 124-26 Bourke Street, East Melbourne. Calder would have been the painter and engraver of the partnership, and he alone was recorded in May as being responsible for the decoration of the Yarra Hotel on the corner of Flinders and William streets, considered by the Age to be 'the best decorated establishment’ beyond the centre of Melbourne during the celebrations in honour of the marriage of the Prince of Wales. This 'very excellent transparency, representing the Prince and Princess in bridal costume, and surrounded by a wreath of oak leaves and roses…the whole being surmounted by the Prince’s plume and motto’ was judged 'worthy of special notice from the brilliancy of its execution’.

Between 1864 and 1867 Calder independently advertised as both artist and photographer ('late of Calder and Nettleton’), from the Bourke Street studios until the end of 1865 when he moved to Queen Street. He also seems to have worked from his residence in Dryburgh Street, West Melbourne (Hotham). Another oil, Portrait of a Lady , was shown at the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. When reporting on the city’s decorations for the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh in 1867, the Age mentioned a 'transparency of some pretensions’ for the Victorian Insurance Company’s offices in Collins Street in which 'a lightly draped nymph, poised in the air without wings, held a crown with her right hand above the head of his Royal Highness, signifying thereby, we presume, her willingness to provide him with one at this side of the world’. Calder also painted a transparency for the Earl of Zetland Hotel showing Prince Alfred’s ship, the Galatea , entering Port Melbourne. It was lit up by the proprietor, Mr Brown, on 10 November 1867, preceding the actual event.

Listed as a professor of painting of 63 Little Collins Street West in the Melbourne Directory for 1868, Calder apparently moved to New Zealand that year. There are references to a painter of this name at Wellington in 1868, then at Auckland until 1899. He contributed oil and watercolour portraits and landscapes to the first exhibition of the Auckland Society of Artists in 1871.

An oil painting, Picnic Point, Brighton by 'Calder’, exhibited by Allan R. Macdonald at the 1869 Melbourne Public Library Exhibition, was undoubtedly his work, as is an undated oil painting of Port Phillip Bay (sold by Christie’s Australia in March 1973) which has been mistakenly attributed to James Erskine Calder .

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011