Design and Art Australia Online

professional photographer, followed his brother Frederick to Victoria some time after 1854 and worked in Melbourne. He then joined Fred in partnership in Tasmania, working at Hobart Town, Launceston and other parts of Tasmania between 1857 and 1864. As Frith & Co.'s Tasmanian travelling photographer in 1857-58, visiting Campbell Town, Longford, Deloraine, Westbury, Carrick, Stanley and Evandale, Henry was popular and prolific. The brothers opened a second studio at Launceston in December 1858. After a brief professional visit to New Zealand in 1859, Henry Frith returned to Tasmania via Sydney in 1860. He worked mainly at Launceston in 1860-61. His photograph of Robert Dowling 's The Last of the Tasmanian Natives (also called Group of Tasmanian Natives ), taken when the painting was shown at the exhibition marking the opening of the Launceston Mechanics Institute building in 1860, was presented to subscribers to the fund that sent Dowling to England and was also sold to admirers of the painting in large numbers. It was Frith’s photograph rather than Dowling’s painting that was the base of engravings in both the colonial and English illustrated newspapers.

Having taken over all the Tasmanian business when Fred moved to Victoria, Henry Frith was located in Hobart Town in 1862-67. His advertisement for sennotype portraits in 1863 resulted in acrimonious disputes with Alfred Bock and Charles Wilson over their respective claims to the process. But the bulk of his business, inevitably, was providing cartes-de-visite portraits. An advertisement in the Hobarton Mercury of 23 January 1864 on behalf of Frith & Co. claimed: 'Mr Frith begs to call attention to his CARTE DE VISITE PORTRAITS, upwards of 30,000 of which have been finished at their establishment in Melbourne during the last summer, and upwards of TEN THOUSAND during the last four months in Hobart Town’. Frith Brothers also provided enlarged photographs that could be painted over by amateurs such as Rev. John Cowpland Dixon whose large portrait (c.1866) of Bishop F.R. Nixon is so deceptively overpainted in oils on a Frith photographic base that until 1988 it was thought to have been solely Dixon’s work. However, by the mid 1860s the Tasmanian market for photography, especially cartes-de-visite, had become too competitive to be either profitable or creative and on 2 May 1867 the Southern Cross announced that Frith & Co. had sold their portrait negatives to George Cherry . Henry moved to Dunedin, New Zealand, where he remained for at least twelve years.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011