Young woman posed in front of a painted studio backdrop of Otago Harbour. Dunedin, New Zealand, 1863-65.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 105 x 63 mm (mount); verso with the imprint of ‘Denslow, Artist, Royal Gallery, Octagon, Princes St., Dunedin’; the print and the mount are both in excellent condition.

‘When John Denslow set up a photographic studio in Dunedin in 1863, he described himself in artistic terms. In an advertisement in Dunedin’s Daily Telegraph, he called his studio the “Royal Portrait Gallery,” referred to his ten years in the “leading galleries” of Melbourne and Sydney, and signed off as “Denslow, Artist”. Nowhere does he mention photography.’ (Jill Marie Haley, The Colonial Family Album: Photography and Identity in Otago, 1848-1890. PhD thesis, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, 2017, p. 26).

John West Denslow had worked as an artist and photographer in Sydney in the years 1857-1862, and we suspect the inspiration for the backdrop depicting the spectacular Otago Harbour which adorned his Dunedin studio (where he was active 1863-1865) came from the various painted backdrops with Sydney Harbour views that featured in a number of Sydney studios of the early 1860s, most notably those of Croft Brothers, John Yates, William Hetzer, James Walker, Charles Pickering, and John T. Gorus. Furthermore, as he was a professional artist, it seems reasonable to speculate that Denslow may have painted the Otago backdrop himself.