professional photographer, art gallery proprietor and dancing teacher, appears to have been a name partner in the photographic firm of Wivell & Johnstone (almost certainly H.J. Johnstone ) which exhibited a collection of photographs at the 1856 Victorian Exhibition of Art. By 1869, however, E.J. Wivell was listed as a 'professor of dancing’ at 231 Rundle Street, Adelaide, South Australia. He published a manual on ballroom dancing about 1874 and apparently continued as a dancing teacher until 1893 (when last listed as such in directories), by which time his son, E.J. Wivell junior, was a violin teacher. Nevertheless, he retained an interest in photography and during the 1870s was closely associated with George Freeman , being secretary of Freeman’s Melbourne Photographic Company until December 1878. The two published an album of Adelaide views in 1874.
Wivell took over the role of proprietor of Adelaide’s leading commercial art gallery from Freeman in 1880 when he established an art gallery in his Rundle Street premises. Most of his exhibits were minor British and European works, including engravings after portraits by his father Abraham Wivell, but the gallery especially featured 'nearly twenty paintings’ of South Australian scenery by Wivell’s presumed former partner, the 'famous Australian artist, Mr. H.J. Johnstone’ (born in Birmingham). Photographs, presumably taken by Wivell’s firm, of the chef d’oeuvre of the collection, Johnstone’s Evening Shadows (subsequently purchased for the Art Gallery of South Australia) were presented to each subscriber to the art union Wivell founded in the same year in order to encourage patrons of his gallery.
The next year Wivell moved to a better-lit and more spacious building in Rundle Place which offered a superior gallery with a studio for amateur painters attached, the latter doubling as a watercolour gallery. Wattle Blossom , 'an Australian annual for holiday readers, bush fireside and the home circle’ – an Adelaide periodical illustrated by Herbert J. Woodhouse – included an advertisement for Wivell’s Art Gallery (admission 1s) in 1881 which listed some of the pictures on show and promised new ones monthly 'direct from the Ateliers of Eminent Artists’. The heavily featured star continued to be H.J. Johnstone whose A Ford on the Acheron River, Victoria was on view for a short time only in 1881, having been purchased by 'an Adelaide gentleman’ from a leading London dealer. Other Johnstone paintings included Off the Track , subsequently purchased by the National Gallery of New South Wales.
Subscribers who paid a guinea for a six months’ season ticket to Wivell’s new gallery received 'a presentation plate’ of the Acheron River painting (probably another photograph) and a ticket in Wivell’s lottery, now re-titled the Art Union of South Australia (as opposed to Freeman’s involvement in the Art Union of Victoria during the 1870s). The sixty or so prizes in his 1884 art union naturally included works by Johnstone: A Cottage Home, Berkshire (valued at £20), Bush Track, Sale, Gippsland (18 guineas) and several artist’s proofs of prints of Evening Shadows and Ford on the Acheron River . That Wivell took his own presentation photographs is confirmed by the fact that Wivell & Co. were listed as commercial 'Art Photographers’ in 1888-89.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
