Photographic portrait of Townsend Duryea (junior), taken by his father, 1871-72.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 106 x 64 mm, recto of mount inscribed in ink in lower margin ‘Jnr. Duryea’; verso with the Townsend Duryea (senior) back mark advertising his firm as ‘By Appointment to H.R.H. the Duke of Edinboro [sic]’ and ‘By Appointment to H.E. Sir Jas. Ferguson [sic], Bart.’; the albumen print has a tiny amount of foxing, but is otherwise very clean; a beautiful, sharp image.

A fine vignette head-and-shoulders portrait of the photographer’s eldest son at the age of around 17.

Townsend Duryea (junior) was born in Adelaide in 1854. He was the eldest of the 12 children of New York-born photographer Townsend Duryea (senior), who, along with his brother Sanford, was one of the most significant of South Australia’s pioneer photographers. Townsend (junior) and his brothers Edwin, Richard and Frank would all follow in the footsteps of their father and uncle and become professional photographers. Although he appears to have been associated in the 1870s with the Adelaide Photographic Company, Townsend (junior) first set up as a photographer with a studio under his own name in Moonta, on the Yorke Peninsula, from around 1880. From 1884 he was back in Adelaide, where he continued working as a photographer for the remainder of his career. He died in Port Pirie in 1925.