scene-painter and actor, came to Melbourne in 1852 and worked for the theatrical entrepreneur George Coppin. In April 1855 he was at Sydney’s Royal Victoria Theatre with Mr Clint ( Scipio Clint ) and Mr Thomas (probably Edmund Thomas ), but by November he was back painting the scenery for Lola Montez’s performance at the Melbourne Theatre Royal. From about 1856 Fry worked at a number of theatres in Bendigo, including the Criterion and the Lyceum whose new scenery for the latter’s production of The Will and the Way was said to be painted by 'Mr Fry’. On 8 May 1862 the Sandhurst (Bendigo) Amateur Dramatic Club gave him a benefit. 'A new grand panorama of the Burke and Wills Exploring Expedition painted by Mr J. Fry with novel mechanical effects’ accompanied by an illustrative lecture on that ill-fated expedition featured on the programme at the Lyceum Theatre on 7 July 1862. Fry’s panorama, however, was not a great success, being described as a copy of the one previously exhibited in Bendigo by Thomas Chuck .
Fry remained at the Lyceum until the end of 1862. The following May he was in Melbourne, working as a scene-painter with Pitt , Opie and others at the Theatre Royal. In September 1867 he was reported as having designed the scenery for The Beulah Spa at Melbourne’s Royal Haymarket Theatre, the set in the second act being especially commended for the pains 'the artist of the company’ had taken to make it look like a garden 'albeit it was a little hard and angular’.
Fry was apparently in Hobart Town in February 1877, when a panorama by him, said to have been painted there, was on show at the Theatre Royal. Stacy’s Great Panorama of the Australian Colonies and New Zealand , painted by Fry using 'well-known sketches that have appeared from time to time in the Illustrated Australian News ' (Colligan p.85), opened at St George’s Hall, Melbourne on 24 March 1877. Although then said to be going to England, it turned up in Wellington, at the Academy of Music, in July 1880. In 1881 Fry was in Adelaide exhibiting at premises opposite the Theatre Royal in Hindley Street, 'THE GREAT PICTURE of the notorious Bushrangers, painted by Fry, from a photograph taken on the ground where the murder of Sergeant Kennedy was committed. Every visitor will be presented with a PHOTOGRAPH of the notorious NED KELLY’. He died in Adelaide on 8 November 1891.
- Writers:
- Maslen, Joan
Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
