Design and Art Australia Online

illustrator, is best known for his pencil portraits. Some were made into etchings by Lionel Lindsay , e.g. that of David Scott Mitchell. Syer illustrated the poems of Henry Lawson and 50 of his pencil drawings were included in a limited edition of Lawson’s In the Days When the World War Wide (n.d.). ML has a strange little ink drawing of four views of Quong Tart dated 8.1.88, 10.9.87 (12), 8.1.87 (7) and 'Sup. [then?] 87’; three show him in a Scottish kilt (two heads and one full length), one in evening dress.

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There is a letter from Walter S. Syer to the publisher George Robertson of the Sydney firm Angus & Robertson of 15 May 1893. It shows they were on confidential terms (State Library of NSW, hereafter ‘SLNSW’, ML MSS AS12/3). There is evidence that Syer at least occasionally lent a hand from 1895 in the decisive move that initiated fully professional literary publishing in Australia on a profit-sharing or royalties basis.
Syer’s signed pencil sketch ‘Henry Lawson 1896’ is in the Dixson collection, SLNSW at P1/L. In 1895, Syer was living at 168 Alfred Street, North Sydney (his brother Arthur’s house) and by 1900 at 341 Alfred Street. He may have also helped in some way with the production of A. B. Paterson’s collection The Man from Snowy River (1895): the Dixson Library, SLNSW copy (89/568) is inscribed: ‘To Walter Syer, with the Publishers’ compliments & thanks’. The publisher was Angus & Robertson. Syer assisted in the early stage of selection of contents for Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1896): see Paul Eggert, Biography of a Book: Henry Lawson’s While the Billy Boils (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2012; and University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), chapters 3-5, 7.
Sir William Dixson commissioned Syer in 1902 to illustrate his copy of the luxury issue of Lawson’s verse collection of 1896 In the Days When the World Was Wide (no. 27 of 50 copies). This copy, now in the Dixson Library, SLNSW (DL 89/571), has about 50 pencil drawings by Syer, mostly sketches of bush characters. He also began to illustrate his own copy (no. 12 of 25) of the luxury issue of the Paterson volume; this copy passed to Dixson and thus to SLNSW (as DL 89/568). One of his three drawings of the reclusive and camera-shy bibliophile David Scott Mitchell, a pen-and-ink drawing of Mitchell in profile entitled ‘An Impression in the Doorway at A&R’s June 93’, is in the John Ferguson papers (ML MSS 1652/90/Miscellaneous). Two were published in the Bulletin, 26 November 1898, and etched by Lionel Lindsay in 1916 (National Gallery of Australia).
Syer was a professional illustrator: see his letter to Dixson of 6 June 1902 from 341 Alfred Street, North Sydney, tipped-in to DL 89/571, which mentions ‘some unexpected little commissions (pen drawings for reproduction) which had to be worked off at once’. Syer illustrated Charles White’s History of Australian Bushranging (1900) for Angus & Robertson (correspondence at ML MSS 314/81, pp. 267–74). As photogravure replaced hand etching of illustrations during the 1890s, financial rewards for etchers and illustrators declined. A letter to Mitchell of 18 February 1899 refers to his ‘sketches made in Sydney Law courts and elsewhere’; those published by illustrated newspapers in Australia are, he says, ‘signed “Cue”’ (ML MSS AS12/1).
The ‘Syer’ photographs (‘Sidelights of old Sydney in the nineties’ at ML Z PXA 394 and dated c. 1885–90) reproduced in James R. Tyrrell, Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney: The Fascinating Reminiscences of a Sydney Bookseller (1952; North Ryde, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1987), opposite p. 101, are by Arthur H. Syer (presumably his brother Arthur). They are 76 albumen originals from subjects traced against Sands directories.
(Paul Eggert, p.eggert@adfa.edu.au)

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007