Studio portrait of a young gentleman posed in front of a painted backdrop with a subtropical landscape. Sydney, c.1865.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 102 x 62 mm (mount); recto with very faint (indecipherable) inscription in pencil to bottom margin; verso with the imprint of ‘Sydney Portrait Rooms, 267 Pitt Street, Sydney’, surmounted by an Advance Australia coat of arms, and with the faint pencilled name ‘Mabbe’; the print has a few light surface marks but is otherwise in good condition, as is the mount.

Robert Stewart arrived in Sydney from England in 1858. Already an accomplished amateur photographer, he worked with Charles Pickering in Sydney from 1859-61, before establishing his own business in May 1862. The first newspaper advertisements for Robert Stewart’s Sydney Portrait Rooms, ‘opposite the Waxworks – Superior Cartes de Visite’, appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald in November 1864. The studio operated at this address until October 1866, when it was announced that the business would relocate to 396 George Street and open its doors at the new premises from 1 November. Robert Stewart moved to Melbourne in 1870 and would found one of the most famous and successful Melbourne studios of the nineteenth century, Stewart & Co.

Examples of Robert Stewart’s cartes de visite from his early career in Sydney are decidedly rare. What makes this portrait even more special is the spectacular painted backdrop, of which we can trace only one other example (SLNSW, acquired from us in 2021).