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professional photographers, stated that they were from the Royal Adelaide Gallery of Arts and Sciences, the Strand, London, an establishment patronised by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, when they offered their Royal Patent Photographic Portraits to Sydney. The Troods’ licence to take photographs (and presumably their equipment) would have been acquired from Antoine François Jean Claudet, proprietor of the Adelaide Gallery (established 1841), and the Troods also claimed to have worked in Paris. Immediately before arriving at Sydney in December 1843, they were travelling around Northern Ireland, 'astonishing the good people of Belfast with that modern miracle-working wonder, Photography’ before moving on to Limerick.

Claudet, who had been producing daguerreotypes in London since 1840, had set up his Adelaide Gallery as a commercial enterprise in opposition to Richard Beard’s Regent Street Gallery at the Royal Polytechnic Institute (established March 1841), and Beard was the patentee from whom George Baron Goodman purchased his photographic licence and equipment before making his triumphant daguerreotype procession through the Australian colonies, beginning at Sydney in November 1842. Back at London Beard instituted legal proceedings against Claudet in 1842 (not resolved until 1847 when Beard won), and the bitter rivalry of these two commercial photographic pioneers was to be played out in miniature in colonial Sydney, with Goodman (Beard re-enacted) emerging as the clear winner in a battle of which he feigned ignorance. The Troods disappeared into oblivion or, perhaps, the backwoods of Victoria.

A year after Goodman had opened his Sydney studio and apparently saturated the local market, Messrs Trood were offering plain and coloured photographs of 'busts, paintings, groups and views’ as well as portraits. They were willing to colour and fix portraits previously taken (by Goodman) in the colony for 6s 6d 'if considered of sufficient merit’. They boasted that their European experience enabled them to present to the colonial public 'talent of such an order as must throw the attempts of any who may have preceded them entirely into the shade’ and that their 'mezzotinto’ portraits would outstrip any recent Sydney photographs, 'as opposite as beauty to deformity’. Their fixing process rendered their photographs 'PERMANENT FOR AGES – a process hitherto unknown in Sydney’ (this was probably true). Finally, they said that their coloured photographic portraits, 'the very latest novelty… will be found to possess (to use the words of the London press) “such exquisite subtilty [sic] of touch and tone as might fill a Vandyke or a Lawrence at once with delight and despair”’. This last quote from the London Observer had been invoked the previous year by Goodman – the specific target, of course, of these claims to superiority!

Edward Barlow , who guaranteed that his watercolour miniature and pencil portraits actually resembled their subjects, responded to the Troods’ arrival by denouncing the 'Burlesquaographic’ nature of photographic portraits. Photography, he claimed, 'has entirely failed all over the world , for the insensible motion of the sitter, and other physical defects inherent in … the machine, totally prevents it ever competing with works of real art … [T]he only successful use to which it could be applied …. is to represent the portraits of the DEAD ... As to Messrs C. & J. Trood pretending to do the thing better [than Goodman], let them be told that talent has nothing to do with Photography, for any Doctor’s boy, after an hour’s information, can do it easily as a Sweep can print his sooty hand on a white-washed wall’. The Troods, who agreed that photography had indeed been 'burlesqued’ before their arrival in the colony, publicly accused Barlow (who boasted of not owning a camera) of sour grapes.

The Troods operated from Charlotte Place, opposite Lyon’s Auction Mart, and their portraits cost from 1 guinea to £1 10s each according to size. At a guinea their standard daguerreotype was cheaper than Goodman’s since their price included the morocco case and possibly some colouring (Goodman is not known to have coloured his daguerreotypes). They also gave lessons in photography. Early in February 1844 the Troods were advertising that they could remain in Sydney for only a limited period; then they disappeared, presumably moving on to other British colonies. Goodman returned to Sydney from Van Diemen’s Land in March and never referred to their visit in any way. But he did acquire a better camera, and his surviving, stabilised, daguerreotypes date only from the following year.

Perhaps the Troods had come to Sydney because they were relatives of Thomas Trood, proprietor of the Albion Printing Office in King Street, and it is possible that at least one of them stayed in Australia and re-entered his former profession after many years or, alternatively, later sent a relative to the colonies. Alan Davies has found a carte-de-visite, which cannot be earlier than the 1860s, from a photographer called Trood of Foster Street, Sale, Victoria.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated: