Studio portrait of a senior Gunaikurnai man and woman. Sale (or Ramahyuck), Victoria, c.1867. JONES, W. H.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 105 x 63 mm (mount); verso imprinted in blue 'Jones, Photographic Artist. Foster Street, Sale, Gipps Land'; verso inscribed in a fully contemporary hand 'King & Queen, Gippsland Blacks in 1867'; a strong print with rich tones, in very good condition (one small ink spot); the mount has a tiny amount of foxing. Although Davies & Stanbury (The Mechanical Eye in Australia) do not list a photographer with the surname Jones in Sale - or any other Gippsland township - prior to 1900, a photographic artist by the name of W. H. Jones, operating a studio in Foster Street, Sale, is well attested through advertisements and notices in Gippsland newspapers of the 1860s and 1870s. This is possibly the William H. Jones whomDavies & Stanbury record as a professional photographer working some years later in the New South Wales south coast towns of Milton and Nowra, in the early 1880s. The following notice appeared in the Gippsland Times, 16 June 1866: 'Borough ofSale.THEBorough Council did, on the 7thinst., appoint W. H.JonesDogInspector, and did authorise him as suchto carry out the provisions of theDogAct within the Borough'. In April 1870, W. H. Jones advertised his photographic business in Sale, in direct competition with the Foster Street photographic establishment of John Trood (who is also not recorded by Davies & Stanbury). Trood had been operating his Sale studio since September 1864, according to his notices placed in the Gippsland Times; but Jones, in a notice published in the same newspaper on 2 April 1870, advertised to the Gippsland his photographic studio immediately next door to Trood's: 'PHOTOGRAPHIC PORTRAITS. W. H. JONES, PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTIST, (Next to Mr. John Trood's, Foster-street, Sale). MEDALLION PORTRAITS, Cabinet Pictures, Cameos, and perfectly life-like portraits in all the various styles. ALBUM PORTRAITURE in every variety and embracing all the latest novelties. VIEWS OF BUILDINGS, LANDSCAPES, &c., taken on reasonable terms. W. H. JONES, Foster-street (opposite the Club Hotel).' The carte de visite we offer here, however, has an inscribed date of 1867, from which we can infer that Jones had been operating a studio - even if not advertising it - from at least as early as that year. After April 1870, Jones continued to advertise heavily, in both the Gippsland Times and Gippsland Mercury, up until December 1872, after which there are no more advertisements for his Sale studio or for his business as a photographic artist in the district, and he seems to disappear suddenly and without trace. Was this photograph taken in Jones's Foster Street studio, or at Ramahyuck, the Aboriginal mission established on the shores of nearby Lake Wellington in 1863 by theMoravian missionary, Reverend Friedrich August Hagenauer? The stark appearance of the studio, with its plain canvas sheet backdrop, and a portable piece of fairly standard patterned carpet, are both elements typical of the makeshift studio of a travelling photographer of the time. A carte de visite portrait of a young woman taken in Jones's Foster Street studio, which is held in the SLV (John Etkins collection; but note, incorrectly attributed to John H. Jones) shows that Jones used a drape and a high-backed chair as a prop in his permanent studio. Another carte de visite by Jones in the SLV, acquired from us in 2023, is a portrait of the same unidentified senior Gunaikurnai man wearing a king plate who is one of the couple in the portrait offered here. Both portraits are likely to have been taken at the same time.