Design and Art Australia Online

sketcher, amateur photographer and solicitor, was born in Hobart Town on 23 February 1837, the second (surviving?) son of Joseph and Mary Morton Allport . His mother taught him to sketch from infancy and preserved in her Book of Treasures his watercolour flower 'painted from nature when four years and five months old’ along with other drawings dating from 1842 to 1855. Curzon became a competent amateur sketcher and photographer. He drew his home in Melbourne (Aldridge Lodge), views in Tasmania, and views and portraits around Parramatta when visiting his Sydney cousins. Examples of his watercolours and sketches, such as View of Battery Point, Hobart (1855, w/c), are in the Allport Library and Museum. He exhibited in the 1858 Hobart Town Art-Treasures Exhibition and was secretary of its committee of management.

Admitted to the Hobart Town Bar in 1860, Allport practised as a solicitor in Melbourne, then in Hobart in partnership with John Roberts from 1878. He continued to sketch at least until returning to Hobart Town. He was a keen member of the Acclimatization Societies of Victoria and Tasmania in the 1860s and 1870s and was commissioner for fisheries of the former during the 1890s. A keen amateur photographer, in July 1887 he was elected first president of the Tasmanian Photographic, Science and Art Association, an amateur group which seems to have been Tasmania’s first photographers’ organisation. It was apparently defunct by the mid-1890s. Curzon Allport died in Hobart on 16 September 1899.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011