Townsend Duryea gives photography prestige among artistic imagery of Adelaide with royal portraits, panoramas
Hindley Street 1865-67 was among many images and panoramas of 19th Century Adelaide by Townsend Duryea (inset). At right: One of his portraits, of an unnamed actress, in the early 1870s.
Hindley Street image courtesy National Gallery of Australia
By the early 1870s, Townsend Duryea's panoramas, royal portraits and prizes won in the South Australian Society of Arts competitions had solidified his fame and the arrival of photography as an art form in Adelaide.
Born in 1823 at Glencoe, Long Island, New York, Duryea trained as a mining engineer and his experience in photography dated from 1840. He also took an art course. He arrived at Melbourne in 1852 and next year entered a studio partnership with Alexander McDonald in Bourke Street.
In 1855, he moved to Adelaide and opened daguerreotype rooms over Prince's store at the King William- Grenfell streets corner. Later that year, Townsend and his brother Sanford formed Duryea Bros. They were the first photographers known to have worked outside Adelaide. By 1856, they’d visited Auburn, Burra, Clare, Kapunda, Goolwa, Milang, Port Elliot and nearby villages.
In 1857, Duryea used experience gained in America as a shipbuilder to build the 32 foot cutter Coquette behind the Maid and Magpie Hotel at Magill. Though said to be for River Murray trade, it was used mainly in racing. Stakes in private challenges were sometimes £100 a side. Duryea also was interested in copper finds near Wallaroo and, by 1861, a fine lode of copper had been cut on section 471, the property of “Mr Duryea and others”. Within a few months, Duryea Mining Association owned 15 mineral sections in the area.
In 1863, Townsend dissolved the partnership with his brother. His studio was the most popular in Adelaide, patronised by governors, visiting dignitaries and Adelaide's leading citizens. As well as portraits, he produced many views, including several notable panoramas of Adelaide. In 1872, he photographed almost all the surviving old colonists and made their portraits into a large mosaic comprising 675 cartes-de-visite.
Duryea was chosen as official photographer for the 1867 royal visit. On November 9, the duke of Edinburgh posed at Duryea's King William Street studio for the first royal portraits made in Australia. Duryea accompanied the official party throughout the visit, travelling in a special photographer's van.
He achieved his high standard with help by skilled operators. These included John Hood, who worked as a photo retoucher under contract to Townsend Duryea for six years from 1863. Hood studied drawing and painting at Imperial College, Paris, and worked for the London photographers Elliott and Fry, before managing his own photographic studio near London Bridge. In Adelaide, Hood also worked as a cartoonist for newspapers such as the Lantern, painted in oils, and taught at Adelaide School of Design.
Duryea always made full use of advertising offered by newspapers and almanacs. His career as a photographer was cut short when his studio and entire collection of 50,000 negatives were destroyed by fire in 1875. This loss was a serious blow to Duryea and historians alike, as the plates were the best record of early South Australian colonial life ever made. After the fire, Duryea moved to the Riverina district of New South Wales and took up a selection near Yanga Lake.
