Design and Art Australia Online

lithographer, printer, architect, surveyor and entrepreneur, arrived at Sydney from London aboard the Lord Goderich on 30 August 1836. He established himself as a decorator, first in George Street and then in Hunter Street, offering ornamental decorating, graining, gilding, cleaning and varnishing pictures, marbling and wood-graining. In the art of 'ornamental painting’, claimed the Sydney Times on 12 November 1836, Barlow was unrivalled; a month later the newspaper was regretting his lack of patronage. Denying that the 'ornamental painting’ business was bad, Barlow nevertheless advised prospective patrons early the following year that he having completed an apprenticeship as an architect and surveyor at Brighton, England he was now working as architect and surveyor from the premises of Raphael Clint .

This career was short-lived. By June Barlow had moved to 9 Bridge Street and was advertising black silhouette profile portraits at 15s full-length, 5s half-length plain and 6s 6d tinted white. In the Commercial Journal of 28 June 1837 he advised his sitters to defer their visits since professional pursuits had called him to the country. In September he took over Sydney’s 'Original Zincographic Printing Establishment’ (apparently that previously operated by J.G. Austin ) and was offering profile portraits, architectural drawings and plans of estates. This business seems to have flourished. In October Barlow was advertising for two or three lithographers and draughtsmen to assist him and the following April he took over the adjoining house. Despite advertising 'One Splendid Lithographic and Zincographic Printing Press’ for sale in November 1837 – possibly an obsolete machine – he was still claiming exclusive title to the process of drawing on zinc in 1838, accusing Clint in September of untruthfully and illegally advertising that he could work a zincographic press.

The printing company continued to expand, and from about May 1838 Barlow also operated The Domestic Bazaar, an agency for servants at the Colonnade shops, Bridge Street. Other sidelines included carving, gilding and re-silvering. In July 1838 he organised a lottery of 160 engravings imported from London which was promoted as a 'Great Novelty’ with tickets drawn from a wheel of fortune. At about this time Barlow began to call his business the Repository of Arts after Ackermann’s world-famous shop in London and continued to expand his multifarious activities. He restored paintings for the merchant and diarist Alexander Brodie Spark, for instance, and Spark mentions attending an art exhibition at Barlow’s in his diary entry for 7 December 1839.

Portraits of Queen Victoria, Governor Richard Bourke, the actress Mrs Taylor as Don Giovanni, and Mary, 'a black of New South Wales’, were published in November 1838, engraved on zinc by William Nicholas . All were admired, particularly the first, and judged 'quite equal to drawings in the same style at home’. A zincographed portrait caricature of the local poet Beverley Suttor, which Barlow displayed in his shop window, showed 'the face of our hero nicely fastened to the carcass of a Jackass which is covered with a Lion’s hide’, reported the Sydney Gazette on 15 January 1839. These prints cost 6d each. Another window display was a lithograph of the burning ship Dispatch . Barlow was also proprietor of a Theatre of Arts, which showed 'the Magic Lantern’ and dioramas of views and exciting events such as the burning of the Royal Hotel or a storm at sea – apparently the show George Peck had presented in Tasmania, which Peck brought to Sydney in 1838 presumably for sale. After Barlow took it over, it commissioned further dioramas and drop scenes from George Keough .

Barlow was the exclusive publisher and seller of Nicholas’s profiles of Australian Aborigines, a technically superior reworking of W. Fernyhough 's Profiles of the Natives . In October 1840, when William Kellett Baker purchased Barlow’s lithographic apparatus, Nicholas was said to be conducting the business. Barlow returned to London. He appears as a lithographer at 33A Red Lion Square in the London Directory for 1842, but then returned to Sydney where family problems, including the death of his 8-year-old son on 8 December 1843 and a very public lawsuit two years later for maintenance and the recovery of her piano by his estranged wife, a music teacher, affected him badly. He was involved in professional quarrels in 1844, accusing Baker of making a spurious copy of The Mayor’s Fancy Ball , the authentic prints of which could only be obtained from him. Political Sketches by B.B. , published that year, cannot have won him friends in high places; Raising the Wind, or Sydney in 1844 , for instance, criticised Governor Gipps’s land policies. His other publication of 1844, Barlow’s Profiles of the Natives , contains prints that are smaller and cruder than either Fernyhough’s or Nicholas’s. The last known reference to him in Sydney is the auction by Moore & Co. of his collection of 'English and Foreign Drawings’ on 2 April 1845.

Writers:

Neville, Richard

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011