Portrait of the photographer’s wife, Elizabeth Glaister. Sydney, c. 1865.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 101 x 64 mm (mount); verso with imprint of ‘T. S. Glaister, Photographic Artist, 253 Pitt Street, Sydney’, and a full contemporary inscription in pencil: ‘Mrs Glaister’; both the print and the mount are in excellent condition.

A possibly unique portrait of Elizabeth Glaister, taken by her English-born husband Thomas Skelton Glaister, one of the most significant photographers active in Sydney in the 1850s and 1860s. Thomas had married Elizabeth (née Gates or Gatz, 1815-1898), widow of Daniel Metcalfe Snr., in the United States in 1849. In 1854 the couple emigrated to Australia, accompanied by Elizabeth’s son, Daniel Frederick Metcalfe, who later would also work as a photographer in Queensland.

The Glaisters arrived in Melbourne from New York in 1854, but by 1855 had already settled in Sydney, where Thomas opened a studio under his own name at 100 Pitt Street. He concentrated on making portrait photographs for Sydney’s wealthy elite, and boasted that although his likenesses – whether daguerreotypes or ambrotypes – were expensive, they would retain their richness and vibrancy for posterity. There is little doubt that Glaister was the leading exponent of the ambrotype in Sydney; from around 1860, he was also one of the first photographers in the colonies to embrace the carte de visite format of albumen print for studio portraiture.

Towards the end of 1863, Glaister relocated his 247 Pitt Street studio a short distance to 253 Pitt Street, which provides us with an earliest possible date for the portrait of Elizabeth Glaister. In an advertisement from November 1863 Glaister claimed that his new Excelsior Photographic Gallery permitted him to take photographs of ‘babies from any age instantaneously’ because it had been ‘erected and built to an entirely new plan, different to any other in New South Wales’.