John Mathieson Sharp b. 1823

  • Artist (Photographer)
John Mathieson Sharp was a professional photographer as well as a dentist. He had a photographic partnership with Frederick Frith. Many of their photographs were of Tasmanian politicians. By the mid 1860s, though, he appears to have abandoned photography.

professional photographer and dentist, had a photographic partnership with Walter Dickenson in Hobart Town, Tasmania from about May to June 1855, then was with Frederick Frith who took over the partnership when Dickenson abandoned photography. Sharp & Frith advertised their Chromatype Gallery at 110 Collins Street in the Hobart Town Advertiser on 20 July 1855; Long states that this makes them the first Tasmanian photographers to advertise 'Chromatype Portraits’ (overpainted matt paper prints from glass collodion negatives). In some cases the overpainting completely obliterated the photograph; even when delicately applied in watercolours rather than oils, it is often hard to distinguish the photographic base. Sharp & Frith’s portrait of William Robertson junior (1855, p.c.) is just one example of a chromatype which has been mistaken for an original watercolour portrait.

Many of Sharp & Frith’s photographs were of Tasmanian politicians: that of J.H. Wedge (1856, Crowther Library), for instance. Naturally, they also catered for families (Mr and Mrs Waller, 1855, and Miss Mary Phipps, 1856, VDL Folk Museum) and professional men (Rev. Dr Lille, 1855, and Bishop F.R. Nixon , 1860). They also took views, and this was more Sharp’s province than Frith’s, who concentrated on portraiture and overpainting. The firm’s five-part full-plate panoramic view of Hobart Town from the Domain, apparently taken by Sharp with some copies coloured by Frith, is one of the earliest surviving panoramas taken in any of the Australian colonies, possibly preceded only by Walter Woodbury 's of Melbourne (1854?). Prints survive in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the Van Diemen’s Land Folk Museum and in Alfred Abbott 's album in the Crowther Library. The Tasmanian Daily News of 17 April 1856 mentioned that one print had gone to England and another had been sent to a 'gallant fellow Tasmanian now in the Crimea’. Newton considers Sharp & Frith’s to be 'the earliest proper panorama, and the real beginning of the collodiotype view trade of prints and albums sold to the public’. Prints were offered in the Tasmanian Daily News on 18 January 1856.

After Frith left the partnership in mid 1856 Sharp employed other artists to do the overpainting, including Alfred Bock and W.P. Dowling . The former, who used watercolour, later claimed that he had been replaced simply because Dowling worked in pastel, a cheaper medium. Despite such aesthetic economies, the firm did not prosper. In 1857 Sharp was advertising as a dentist while continuing to take and sell photographs from his studio-surgery, still called Sharp & Co.'s Chromatype Gallery. He exhibited a chromatype Merry Musician (described as 'a child at the piano laughing at the sound he produces’) at the 1858 Hobart Town Art-Treasures Exhibition and was advertising 'life sized photographs of the elite of Tasmania’ the same year. It was to no avail. The closure of the gallery was announced on 26 November 1858 and Sharpe became solely a dentist in professional listings.

Nevertheless, for some years he continued to take and sell uncoloured view photographs, offered photography lessons and stocked cameras and other photographic equipment at his dental surgery. He supplied the views reproduced in Hugh Munro Hull 's The Experiences of Forty Years in Tasmania (Hobart Town 1859) and listed stereoscopic photographs of Tasmanian scenery for sale in Walch’s Literary Intelligencer from 1859 to July 1861. The National Gallery of Australia has a Mount Wellington view of 1860, and several photographs taken during this period are in Alfred Abbott’s album: On the Derwent, New Norfolk (1859), Hobart Town from Rosney Point (1860), Ball-Room Government House (1860) and Tablet to Dr Smith on Mount Wellington (1861). Sharp was friendly with the Abbotts and accompanied them on photographic excursions. Views of Mount Wellington taken in 1859, with Charles Abbott and Sharp’s (dental?) apprentice A. Singer in the foreground, are also in the Abbott album. Sharp appears to have entirely abandoned photography by the mid 1860s and his career as a photographer was not mentioned in his obituary in 1899.

Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1992
Last updated:
2011