painter and professional photographer, worked in Melbourne between 1855 and 1869. At the end of 1855 Hill replaced one of the Duryea brothers in the firm of Duryea & Macdonald at 3 Bourke Street East but stayed only a few months, opening his own photographic studio at 9 Collins Street West in 1856. The following year he returned to Bourke Street and remained there until 1863, calling his studio the Post Office Photographic Gallery. He produced portraits in every known photographic medium – daguerreotype, collodion wet-plate (ambrotype) and talbotype (calotype) – and he also painted miniatures on ivory (possibly on a photographic base).
In 1856 Hill showed a collection of his photographs at the Victorian Exhibition of Art; in 1860 he exhibited a variety of photographic portraits. An oil painting was shown in the 1861 Victorian Exhibition and he seems to be the 'Mr. Hill’ who showed coloured portrait photographs of all members of the Heales ministry at the Ballarat Mechanics Institute Exhibition in 1863. His ambrotype portraits of Robert O’Hara Burke and William John Wills taken in 1860 are in Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney; a wood-engraving after a Hill photograph of Mr. Burke and Mr. Wills, Australian Explorers was reproduced in the Illustrated London News on 1 February 1862.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
