Design and Art Australia Online

painter, amateur photographer, naturalist and solicitor, was born in England on 4 December 1830. The eldest child of Joseph and Mary Morton Allport , he came to Hobart Town at the age of 12 months. From childhood he was encouraged to take an interest in natural history and art by his mother, although he never worked professionally as an artist. Admitted to the bar in 1852, he became a partner in his father’s legal firm. He was an active member of the Royal Society of Tasmania and corresponded with many European scientists, as well as being an expert on Tasmanian botany and zoology and a keen bushwalker. He played a leading part in the introduction of salmon to Tasmania.

Taught painting and drawing by his mother and John Skinner Prout , Morton Allport exhibited two watercolours and a substantial oil painting ( View on Hall’s New Road to Huon, Tasmania, Fern Tree Gully , p.c.) in the 1858 Hobart Town Art-Treasures Exhibition. But Morton Allport did not develop these talents, turning instead to photography soon after returning from a trip to Europe in 1855. He acquired Charles Abbott 's camera in 1859, and Chris Long has suggested that his photography dates only from this purchase – and from a move to Holbrook Place that year, where he lived and worked until 1873. Albums containing Morton Allport’s half-plate and stereoscopic prints are in the Allport Library, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and the Archives Office of Tasmania (stereo lantern views of Hobart Town, 1861). He is also represented in Alfred Abbott 's album in the Crowther Library. The Allport Collection contains numerous photographs incorporating members of his family, his parents in particular often being posed in outdoor views.

That Allport’s photographs were normally studies of his family and local scenery is characteristic of amateur work at the time. Less typically, he seems to have made the first photographic expedition to the Lake St Clair region, exhibiting the stereoscopic photographs he took at the 1862-63 Hobart Town Art Treasures and Industries Exhibition {Winter says he made one photographic expedition in 1863. Although he had previously visited Lake St Clair, it was not with photographic equipment.} Walch’s Literary Intelligencer praised his photographs of the 'singularly romantic though wild country’ around Lake St Clair as 'beautiful and artistic’, such subjects appealing to the current taste for sublime landscape. A member of the Amateur Photographic Association of Great Britain, it was most probably Allport, under the pseudonym ' Paul Ricochet ', who described this tour in the English Photographic News . Another excursion made to nearby Mount Arrowsmith, also a wilderness site, resulted in more photographs, discussed in the Launceston Examiner of 17 February 1863. Examples of his work were published in the London Stereoscopic Magazine in 1864 and Samuel Calvert cut wood engravings after his photographs for the Melbourne illustrated papers. The Salmon-Breeding Ponds, on the River Plenty, Tasmania , for instance, was published in the Illustrated Melbourne Post on 20 August 1864.

Allport was a major organiser of the 1858 Hobart Town Art-Treasures Exhibition and a member of the committee responsible for sending Tasmanian exhibits to the 1862 London International Exhibition. He was also a commissioner for the Tasmanian section of the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition, at which he won a medal for his photographs.

In 1856 Allport married Elizabeth, elder daughter of Lieutenant Thomas Ritchie of Scone Mills, Perth, Tasmania. Their daughter, Curzona Frances Louise (Lily ) Allport , became a well-known professional painter. Morton Allport died in Hobart Town on 10 September 1878 and was buried in Queenborough Cemetery. The author of his obituary, published in the Mercury on 11 September and reprinted on both paper and silk, is said to have been Louisa Anne Meredith .

Writers:

Willis, Anne-Marie

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011