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professional photographer, was born in Glencoe, Long Island, New York. He trained as a mining engineer but renounced this for art and photography, the latter an interest said to have dated from the 1840s. He arrived at Melbourne in 1852 and set up a photography business with A. McDonald (q.v.), the partners claiming between them to have worked 'in all the different continents’. The firm of Duryea & McDonald of 3 Bourke Street East, Melbourne, with a branch at Geelong, apparently also included Townsend’s brother Sanford . They exhibited 'daguerrean portraits and views’ at the 1854 Melbourne Exhibition.

Duryea & McDonald opened a portrait studio in Liverpool Street, Hobart Town, on 11 December 1854. Their daguerreotype of Dr Crooke was mentioned in the Hobart Town Advertiser on 16 January 1855 and on 30 May the Tasmanian Daily News carried an advertisement in which a fictitious customer sang the firm’s praises, advising all:

Whether single, married, grave or gay,

To attend and profit by their stay;

Lest the Artists to their sorrow

Be here to-day and gone to-morrow.

The verse proved prophetic and the partnership was dissolved immediately afterwards. Alfred Bock moved into their premises in July.

After returning to Melbourne, Townsend Duryea left for Adelaide, South Australia, and opened his own photographic studio. His 'NEW STYLE OF PORTRAITURE’, offered in the form of 'stereoscopic or solid pictures, magic background, crayon, instantaneous pictures, &c.’, was praised in the South Australian Register of February 1855, soon after his arrival. Six weeks later Townsend opened specially designed and lit rooms on the corner of King William and Grenfell streets: 'Valuable discoveries in Chemicals, combined with fifteen years practical experience’, his advertisements claimed, 'enables him to make Portraits not to be surpassed by any artist in Europe or America’. He offered to copy daguerreotypes, paintings and statues, as well as take views and portraits, and would insert daguerreotypes into lockets, brooches, rings and so on.

Duryea worked in other South Australian towns in 1856, including Auburn, Clare, Kapunda, Goolwa, Milany and Port Elliot, advertising that country people who wanted to show 'friends at a distance how they stand the wear and tear of time can therefore…have the opportunity of gratifying that amiable and affectionate desire’ and 'enshrine themselves in the immortality of his art’. This tour appears to have been the reason for the formation of the Duryea Brothers firm, incorporating his brother Sanford, which was announced in the South Australian Register on 31 December 1855. The partnership continued until Sanford went to Western Australia in 1857, then Townsend joined up with William Nixon until about 1860.

After Sanford returned to Adelaide at the end of 1859, the firm of Duryea Brothers was reinstated. It lasted until 1863, mainly producing portrait photographs. Meanwhile, Townsend’s 1856 tour had resulted in South Australia’s first known photographs of rural scenery. All are daguerreotypes although by then he was possibly experimenting with other forms of photography. At the 1859 exhibition of the South Australian Society of Arts, Townsend showed four 'crayon photographs’ as well as a daguerreotype. The subjects were unspecified, but the term suggests a paper print hand-coloured with pastels such as Edwin Dalton was offering in Sydney by December 1858.

In 1864 Townsend Duryea set up a one-man practice at 66 King William Street which became the busiest photographic studio in Adelaide. Initially producing mainly ambrotypes, he took views of the early settlement and portraits of its leading citizens. In 1865 he published landscape photographs in the carte-de-visite format and introduced life-sized portraits enlarged with the solar camera, the latter taking several hours to print. At about this time he also improved his studio lighting: 'Portions of the northern wall and roof of his premises have been removed, and a large inclined window substituted, by which any amount of light can be admitted’.

In the 1865 edition of Joseph Boothby’s Adelaide Almanack Town and Country Directory, and Guide to South Australia , Duryea innovatively pasted his own gem portrait at the end of an advertisement for sennotypes in lieu of a signature. Bob Noye has pointed out that he specialised in these adhesive-backed gem portraits (smaller than a 10-cent coin) which he sold at 50s a hundred. This first example was also one of the earliest Australian uses of an original photograph in a published book, although it was possibly preceded by F. Crawford at the rival Adelaide Photographic Company. Duryea may have provided the tiny photographic heads which James Shaw glued onto several oil paintings at about this time.

Duryea’s Adelaide Album , published in 1866, consisted of seven street scenes and a photograph of an ink drawing depicting the death of Burke by A.G. Baynes . Again his gem portrait was pasted inside the front cover in lieu of a signature, while a fold-out panorama of Adelaide taken from the tower of Adelaide Town Hall in 1865 was the album’s major feature. A later version of this panorama is 13 feet (3.96 m) long (R.J. Noye Collection, Mortlock Library).

On 8 November 1868, Duryea was presented with a medal at the South Australian Agricultural and Horticultural Society’s show for his exhibits. They included 'large photographs in oil and water-colours’ and 'street views remarkable for correctness of perspective and distinctness of detail’. The award was presented by Australia’s first visiting Royal, the Duke of Edinburgh, to whom Duryea was appointed an official photographer throughout the tour of South Australia. The Duke visited Duryea’s studio, the King William Street Photographic Gallery, to have his likeness taken on 9 November 1867 and Duryea thus became the first of many colonial photographers to receive royal patronage. Hundreds of copies of Prince Alfred’s autographed portrait photograph were sold.

In 1869 Duryea advertised in the South Australian Almanac and Directory that he had won five prizes for excellence in various styles of photographic portraiture ('all the prizes for Highly-finished Photographs’) at the annual exhibition of the Society of Arts in December 1868. He won more prizes at three of the society’s subsequent exhibitions, plus a medal at the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition for his photographs of South Australian Aborigines and scenery. Like Henry Jones , he photographed South Australia’s male pioneers at Emanuel Solomon’s famous banquet in 1871, combining about 675 separate cartes-de-visite into one huge mosaic (Mortlock Library). The young Townsend junior, also to become a photographer, was awarded the prize for the second-best drawing in pencil or chalk of a head made by a pupil of the School of Design at the society’s exhibition that year.

Duryea’s studio and enormous collection of glass-plate negatives, stated to number 50 000, were destroyed by fire in 1875. When the studio re-opened in November 1876 Duryea had sold out to S.E. Nixon and it was under the management of C.H. Manning, later the proprietor. Duryea took up a selection at Balranald in the Riverina district of New South Wales. He died on 13 December 1888 in a buggy accident. Eight sons and four daughters from his three marriages survived him, including the four photographer sons whom he had taught: Townsend junior, who continued the name in Adelaide and Moonta after his father’s death, Edwin, Richard and Frank. Many apprentices and employees went on to become successful photographers from this popular Adelaide studio, including Henry Jones, Nicholas Caire and John Hood . The Mortlock Library holds the major collection of Duryea’s photographs.

Duryea Panorama: Adelaide, 1865 Presentation of the story of U.S.born photographer Townsend Duryea , who participated in the 19th-century craze for panoramas by creating a photographic panorama of Adelaide, capital of South Australia. An excellent interactive version of the panorama, now a valuable historical resource, can be downloaded in compressed format.

Also…

As the demand for visual and realistic entertainment grew, the panorama – cunningly lit cylindrical paintings of exotic themes, great cities and national triumphs – produced a continuous passing scene to stunned spectators. By the 1820s Louis Daguerre’s diorama combined transparent paintings, changing patterns of light and three-dimensional models to dazzle audiences seated in a moving auditorium, viewing only a section at a time.

In 1856 a Sydney production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin trumpeted its thirty-metre long panorama of New Orleans and as late as 1889 two American entrepreneurs, Isaac Reed and Howard Gross visited Australia and built venues for their stock of nine battles.

http://ww3.fusion.com.au/duryea/

The Moving Diorama [panorama – ed.]

http://www.ozemail.com.au/~reed/bookshop

The moving diorama [panorama – ed.] exhibited in Australia was a length of canvas (about three metres high) rolled across a proscenium. The moving canvas retained a transparent component and, with the aid of limelight flashes, the moon (for example) could be seen to rise or the shell fire of a battle scene could be made more realistic. They were used especially in pantomime and as precursors to newsreels or travelogues.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989