Design and Art Australia Online

amateur photographer(?), was a daughter of James Campbell. On 5 February 1863 she married Rowley Lambert, commodore of the Royal Navy’s Australia Station from August 1867 to August 1870 and captain of the flagship Challenger . Several albumen silver photographs in a decorated photographic album compiled between 1868 and 1870, Who and What We Saw at the Antipodes , were attributed to her by Martin Jolly when this and another album (clearly a pair) were acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 1983. Three interior views are thought to be of the Lamberts’ house in Phillip Street, Sydney, while another is of the Hon. Mrs Du Cane’s Melbourne boudoir—a women’s precinct. Apart from this attribution, however, Mrs Lambert is unknown as a photographer. A series of photographs in the second album are signed by the photographer Lady Fanny Jocelyn, but she never came to Australia.

The most dramatic of several embellished photographs in the first [?] album shows four theatrically posed figures on the verandah of the Macleays’ Elizabeth Bay House, Sydney, dressed in the fancy costumes they wore to the ball in honour of the Duke of Edinburgh held in the Prince of Wales Theatre on 10 March 1868: Mrs William Macleay (née Susan Deas Thomson) as the gipsy Azucena, the Misses Eglantine (Tiny) and Helen (Nelly) Deas Thomson as a Roman peasant and a Spanish gitana respectively, and Viscount Newry as a monk. Everything except the figures, ground and two columns has been cut out of the photograph and a background watercolour view of Sydney Harbour from the house painted in, together with a healthy twining grape-vine beside the columns.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

1989