Studio portrait of Lieutenant Nassau Stephens, RN. Melbourne, December 1872.

Albumen print photograph in carte de visite format, 104 x 63 mm (mount); verso with the imprint of ‘Barchelder & Co., Artist Photographers, 41 Collins St. East, Melbourne’, and with a roughly contemporary inscription in ink ‘December 1872’; the print and the mount are both in good condition; the carte is accompanied by a section cut from its original album window mount, also bearing a contemporary caption which identifies the sitter as ‘Nassau Stephens, R.N.’.

In 1872, Lieutenant Nassau Stephens was officer-in-charge of the 50-strong unit of marines attached to HMSS Clio (1858). The naval corvette, under the command of Commodore Frederick H. Stirling, had arrived on the Australia Station in September 1870 and served as its flagship up until 1873, operating chiefly in the waters off the eastern seaboard, in the Bass Strait, the Tasman, and the Western Pacific, where she played a key role in anti-blackbirding missions.

Provenance: From an album associated with the Lempriere and Gresley families of Hobart and Melbourne.