professional photographer, second son of the leading British and American studio photographer John Jabez Edwin Mayall (1810-1901), was originally Joe Meal, but he became known as Joseph Parkin Mayall after his father changed the family surname. He opened a studio at 57 Collins Street, East Melbourne, in 1870 in the name of Mayall & Sons, a junior branch of his father’s London photographic firm which seems to have had connections with Melbourne from 1858. Joseph P. Mayall was operating the Collins Street studio in his own name in 1871 and he continued in business in Melbourne until 1875. Then he apparently returned to England.
At the 1870 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition Mayall & Sons (of Collins Street, Melbourne) showed 'Portraits from life, large size and cartes de visite’. A note in the catalogue stated that the large photographs were magnified in the solar camera, 'printed direct on chloride of silver, and finished in sepia. The negatives are taken in the half-length carte de visite style with a large lens, securing by this means perfect definition. The negative being on a plane surface, enlarging the same cannot, from the very nature of the process, admit of distortion’.
J.P. Mayall of 55 and 57 Collins Street, East Melbourne, exhibited a large selection of portrait photographs at the 1872 Victorian Intercolonial Exhibition preceding the London International Exhibition of 1873. They included a portrait of the actor-manager George Coppin and life-size photographs of various prominent Melbourne men, 'Two Frames Containing 80 Cartes-de-Visite’, 'A Series of Eight Enlargements from Carte Size’ and 'Group of Prince and Princess of Wales, in Wedding Dress’ (1863), the last obviously from his father. The photographs for F.G. Stephens’s Artists at Home (New York 1884), an album of photogravures of English painters and their houses, were taken by J.P. Mayall.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
