Daniel Marquis (1829-1879), photographer, was born on 17 May and baptised on 24 May 1829. and raised in Glasgow. He was the second of twelve children of John and Mary Marquis, who were grocers, victualers and spirit mer¬chants.
In 1851 Daniel married Grace Murray in Glasgow; he was 22 years old and working in a cloth warehouse; she was 20 and keeping house for her father and her five younger siblings. Grace and Daniel went on to have five children, of whom three survived to adulthood.
By 1855 Daniel was working as a photographer in Glasgow. In 1856 he was running his own studio in Grangemouth. In 1857 he was in Hamilton. By 1858 the family had moved to Stirling where Daniel opened a studio in Mayday Yard, then at 32 King Street, and later in Barnton Place.
In 1862 doctors certified that Grace Marquis was insane and she was treated for several months in the Montrose Royal Asylum. For most of the following year she was in the Royal Edinburgh Asylum.
In late 1864 the family left Scotland for a new life in Australia. They sailed from London to Moreton Bay as fare-paying passengers in the clipper ship Flying Cloud. The household — Daniel (35 years old), his wife Grace (33), their children Isabella (9), John (7), and James (5), and Grace’s sister Margaret Murray (23) — arrived in Brisbane in March 1865.
By the end of 1865 Daniel had rented studio and living space in George Street in Brisbane. Within a few years the family had bought land and built a house beside the river at Lower River Terrace, South Brisbane. They also used their government-issued land orders to buy 33 acres (13½ hectares) of rural land on the river at Indooroopilly.
Daniel established a successful photographic business in the George Street studio. He made portraits that were presented as albumen prints in carte-de-visite and larger formats. Outside the studio he photographed the town’s buildings and places, either on commission or for sale as stock items. He produced albums of views. He showed his work in exhibitions, took forensic photographs for the police, provided photographs to make engravings for publication, and he made copies of drawings.
His most remarkable work was a series of photographs of Indigenous people who posed in his studio for solo and group portraits — he was the most prolific Brisbane photographer in this genre in the 1860s and 1870s.
In 1873 Grace Marquis had another breakdown and was treated at the Woogaroo Lunatic Asylum near Brisbane.
Daniel Marquis died of hepatitis in 1879 at the age of 49 and was buried at South Brisbane Cemetery. He left his estate to his sister-in-law, Margaret Murray, as trustee for Grace and the three children. Daniel’s photographic business, including his archive of negatives, was sold to another operator, but it was closed about a year later.
Grace was admitted to the Woogaroo asylum again in 1881 and died there in 1882.
The three Marquis children who came to Queensland in 1865 all married and stayed in Queensland. Grace’s younger sister Margaret continued living in the house at South Brisbane until she sold it in 1887.
The lives of Daniel Marquis and his family exemplify the experience of Scottish migrants who came to Queensland in the 1860s. Daniel did not leave a cache of diaries or letters to tell his story, so much of his personal life remains obscure, but a substantial photographic legacy has survived in private and public collections.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2020
