professional photographer, was educated at the Society of Friends’ school at Rawden, near Leeds, Yorkshire. The Quaker missionary Frederick Mackie meeting him in Sydney on 3 September 1853 noted that before coming to New South Wales from Liverpool in 1852 Hart had been 'tossed about the world a great deal, going to China, Manila, California, the South Sea Islands, New Zealand etc.’ He had now set himself up in Sydney 'taking Daguerreotype likenesses’. On 23 December 1852, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that a 'small collection of daguerreotype portraits by Mr. Hart, evincing great skill and fidelity’ were on display at the summer exhibition of the Botanic and Horticultural Society. Two days later Hart ran an advertisement in the same paper giving his address as 156 Elizabeth Street.

Early in 1853 he was offering coloured daguerreotype group portraits. In July H.S. Sadd produced an engraving of Edward Hargraves, the gold 'discoverer’, from a Hart daguerreotype. In September Hart advertised for an assistant at his Daguerrean Portrait Gallery, by then at 481 George Street. In March 1854 he was hailed by the Herald as the first professional photographer to employ the collodion (ambrotype) process locally. Soon afterwards, however, Hart announced that he was quitting his studio in order to make a professional tour into the interior for the benefit of his health which, he claimed, had been 'seriously impaired by close application to business, and the impossibility of getting an assistant to conduct the establishment in his absence’. By June the studio was occupied by J. Lyne Brown .

Hart was undoubtedly 'E.H.’, who wrote to the Herald in December 1854 handing on a new honey preservative formula for the collodion process which he had read about in the British Photographic Society Journal . He spent the next two years travelling between Newcastle and Sydney, then settled at West Maitland from about 1857. A pair of ambrotypes of a man and a woman (Josef Lebovic Gallery), the former dated 15 August 1859 in pencil on the case lining, were presumably taken there. Hart was associated with the Maitland School of Arts and was one of two delegates sent to Sydney with a petition requesting the governor to open the 1861 Maitland Industrial Exhibition. His 'daguerreotypes’ (ambrotypes?) shown at this exhibition won a prize. The following year Hart took over Mrs Dewey 's photography studio in Newcastle while continuing his Maitland business. In April 1865 he advertised for a 'negative operator’ for Maitland, but some months later offered this studio for sale, again citing ill-health as the reason.

Accordingto Cato, who thought his work 'probably the most advanced of all the country camera men’, Hart annually sent prints to Sydney for exhibition and was a frequent contributor to the British Journal of Photography . His invention of the 'Saronytype’ was highly praised by Joseph Docker , and he won a highly commended certificate at the 1870 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition. Hart was still at Maitland in 1872 when elected vice-president of the School of Arts exhibition committee.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011