Design and Art Australia Online

Amateur photographer, watchmaker and optician, was the elder brother of Alfred Abbott . With his mother and brother he came to Hobart Town in 1850 to join his emancipist father in business as a clock-maker. In 1857-59 Charles took landscape photographs and, with Alfred, accompanied John Mathieson Sharp on photographic excursions. He conducted some early experiments in colour printing using the chemicals potassium permanganate and potassium ferrocyanide. Alfred Abbott’s album (Crowther Library) contains several of Charles’s photographs, mainly stereoscopic prints of views and buildings in and near Hobart. A few are colour experiments, such as the blue half-plate Hobart Town from the Back of our Residence in Murray Street (showing the Abbott garden with its workshop and pear tree in the foreground). He abandoned photography in 1859 and sold his camera to Morton Allport . Also a skilled watchmaker and optician, Charles carried on the family business after his father’s death in 1883 until his own death five years later.

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