Face Value: The Assassination Of Portrait Painting By Photography, 1850-1870

An important colonial artist, ignored for 150 years, is finally revealed. Lost works are found. A rich social context emerges from the sediment of time.Richard Noble has no biography, just some comical errors passing as fact.What emerges is a Dickensian tale of humble beginnings, great expectations, and migration to the ends of the earth. Instant success in Australia gives way rapidly to personal tragedy and ignominious decline. Noble was, like many artists, a victim of photography. Too old and proud to submit to the rapacious new entrepreneurs of the camera, Noble retreats to his birthplace in Kent, only to find the villages gone, replaced by terraced suburbia. His long life ends in pinched obscurity.Art history failed Richard Noble. But he's not alone. The entire milieu of mid-19th century colonial art is neglected. Dozens of notable artists remain in limbo, known from a few fragmentary records, often inaccurate. Consequently, this research expanded to flesh out the stories of some of Noble's contemporaries, including photographers and sitters. The brief, brutal struggle between painting and photography is examined in detail. The corrupt career of the thrice-failed portrait painter Edwin Dalton, who dominated Sydney photography before sailing back to London a wealthy man, is the converse of the ideal of the gentleman artist.Dalton, con-man, cad and philanthropist, is utterly and unjustly forgotten today. He was Sydney University's largest early donor.Mid-colonial art is firstly the victim of fashion. It has none of the exoticism of early colonial art, and pre-dates Impressionism. Secondly, the methodological failures of art history cripple the past. The individual first needs a genealogy, but even the birth and death dates of many colonial artists are unknown. The artist must be intimately cross-referenced in time and space. Census and shipping records, maps, town plans, church registers and newspaper references must be trawled. The links between artists, patrons, sitters, framers and others can then be sketched in.'Face Value? is, as much as anything, a guide to researching social and economic context: the inexorable parameters of private lives.

• | Author: Frank Campbell
• | Publisher: Robert Owen Press
• | Publication Date: Jul 16, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 310 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover/Biography & Autobiography
• | ISBN-10: 0994604327
• | ISBN-13: 9780994604323