Outdoor portrait of a young boy in a garden, resting his arm on a chair. Hobart Town, c.1862.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 102 x 62 mm (mount); verso wet-stamped ‘Stewart, Photographer, 21, Harrington St., Hobart Town’; the print is in excellent condition; the mount has clipped corners but is very clean.

Taken outdoors in a garden setting, this is a highly unusual colonial portrait photograph for such an early period. Whether the garden was the photographer’s own (we suspect it was), or else belonged to the family of the young boy, is not clear. The studio of James Stewart is not listed in Davies & Stanbury (Mechanical Eye). The only information on James Stewart in the DAAO entry is that he was advertising ambrotype portraits from his Harrington Street studio in April 1862.