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professional photographer and grocer, appears to have been the S. Clifford who arrived at Hobart Town from London in December 1848 by the Windermere . On 24 September 1851, at St John’s Church, New Town, Samuel Clifford, aged twenty-four, married Ann Margaret Giles. He was appointed storekeeper at the Hobart Town Prisoners’ Barracks in October 1851 and remained there until 1856, then went into partnership with Edward Williams as a real estate agent. The partnership was dissolved in October and Clifford continued on his own. By January 1858 he was established as a grocer in Australia House, 69 Liverpool Street, where he remained for several years.

Having taken photographs from at least 1859, early in 1861 Clifford advertised in Walch’s Literary Intelligencer and the Hobart Town Advertiser that his stereoscopic views of Tasmanian scenery were on sale at his grocery shop together with photographic equipment. Then, after paying a short visit to Melbourne, he set up a 'New Photographic Establishment’ at 132 Liverpool Street, opposite Perkins’s Emporium, where, he announced, he would in future devote himself entirely to the stereoscopic photographs for which he had long been known. While in Melbourne he had photographed a most unusual subject: an artificially-lit waxworks tableau in Kreitmeyer’s Waxworks Museum, showing the explorers Burke, Wills and King at Cooper’s Creek. His half-plate albumen print of the three realistic figures (modelled by the sculptor Charles Summers) in front of a painted backdrop bushland setting (artist unknown) is in Alfred Abbott 's album (Crowther Library).

In 1862 Clifford exhibited photographs of Tasmanian scenery at the Hobart Town Art Treasures Exhibition and in 1865 he claimed to have received the highest award for architectural and landscape photography at a New Zealand exhibition (presumably Dunedin). The 100 stereoscopic views of Tasmanian scenery and the large photograph of Hobart’s Governor Franklin statue that he showed in Melbourne’s 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition were praised by the pseudonymous “Sol”, who greatly admired Clifford’s 'dry’ stereographs produced by 'Russel’s tannin process’: 'Surely no wet photography ever excelled these delightful representations of nature’.

A number of Clifford’s photographs were reproduced as lithographs in the colonial illustrated press and in a German immigration handbook (Hamburg 1870). From the mid 1860s he sold albums of views; a number survive in Tasmanian public collections. Clifford produced portraits of the Tasmanian Volunteers, taken at a rifle match on 17 October 1863, together with views of Hon. T.Y. Lowes’s estate, Lowestoft, Glenorchy, where this had been held. The portraits were extensively and favourably reviewed.

Clifford was one of four local photographers commissioned to cover the Tasmanian part of the Duke of Edinburgh’s 1867 68 Australian tour; his photographs are held in the Tasmanian Museum and in the Archives Office of Tasmania. His view of Governor Du Cane’s swearing-in ceremony, taken from the corner of Elizabeth and Macquarie streets, was praised in the Evening Mail of 19 January 1869. In 1870 he was advertising in the Mercury as 'Prize Medallist at Melbourne and New Zealand. Photographer to H.R.H. Prince Alfred at Government House by Command’ and inviting visiting 'officers and others’ from the Flying Squadron 'to inspect the largest and choicest stock of photographs of Tasmanian scenery from all parts of the Islands that can be obtained in any of the Colonies’.

The bulk of Clifford’s business always remained stereographic scenery which he produced in very large numbers. As early as 1865 he was advertising that he had 700 stereoscopic views of Tasmania available. His most significant work was done by 1873 although he continued in business in Hobart Town until bought out by the Anson Brothers in 1878. He died at his son’s residence at Melton Mowbray on 14 April 1890. His wife had died in childbirth on 9 January 1867.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011