Silver Gelatine Studio Photograph of Australian Aboriginal Warriors from NSW - $1,750 SOLD
Stock# 120617

James Tyrrell (1875-1961) was a Sydney based publisher and bookseller whose customers included Henry Lawson and Norman Lindsay. The American authors Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stephenson are also known to have frequented Tyrell’s Bookshop when visiting Sydney. In 1914 Tyrell opened a bookshop at 143 Castlereagh Street, Sydney that also included a museum that housed his eponymous collection of Australiana.

Two of Sydney’s most prolific photographic studios at the turn of the nineteenth century were run by Henry King and Charles Kerry, both of whom recorded early Australian history and anthropology and particularly portrait studies of Australian Aborigines. In the mid-1920s,Tyrrell acquired the photo glass negatives of both studios which he used occasionally to produce photographs for his own publications. The glass negatives were later purchased by Australian Consolidated Press which eventually donated them to the Powerhouse Museum.

Strand Coins has recently acquired a reference collection of original silver gelatine photographs of aborigines taken from the glass negatives once owned by Tyrell. Most bear the company stamp of ‘Tyrell’s Museum 143 Castlereagh Street’ on the reverse and are thought to date back to the 1920s. They are extremely rare in this format as they were not marketed by Tyrell and have survived in very small numbers.