painter and professional photographer, was born in Norwich, England, eldest son of Joel Fox, a furrier and a prominent member of the Jewish community, and his first wife, Eliza. Fox’s father was a native of Lissa, Prussia (now Leszno, Poland), who had come to Norwich in 1816 aged about thirteen, was naturalised in 1846 and remained there until his death in 1872. Alexander Fox came to Melbourne in search of gold in the early 1850s. He married Rosetta, eldest daughter of Solomon Phillips and Caroline, née Solomon, in Melbourne on 20 September 1854 – the Phillipses being a cultured and devout Melbourne Jewish family. Alexander and Rosetta had six sons and a daughter, their second youngest child being the painter Emanuel Phillips Fox.
After unsuccessfully pursuing gold on the Bendigo diggings, Alexander Fox opened his Daguerrean Gallery in Bridge Street, Sandhurst (Bendigo) in 1856. The Bendigo Advertiser of 9 September 1856 noted that Fox’s daguerreotype likenesses were 'for accuracy, beauty and freshness in detail equal if not superior to anything of the sort seen in the colony’. He soon began casting an eye on the colourful passing scene; in 1857, experimenting with the new collodiotype process of wet-plate photography, he produced a series of views of Sandhurst streets, the first known photographic record of early Bendigo. He also made a tour of the local goldfields in 1856, taking mining photographs. Some of these were later drawn on stone by A.J. Stopps and published locally as prints and letterheads by J.J. Blundell & Co. and George Slater (examples Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; La Trobe Collection, State Library of Victoria).
In 1858 Fox moved from Bridge Street to View Point (his former studio was taken over by the photographers Morgan and Fill ). His panorama of View Point was considered by the Bendigo Advertiser to be 'a triumph of the art—the most minute details being brought out sharp and distinct, the shades beautifully mellowed, and happily wanting that cloudy appearance in parts which too often disfigures these productions’. This is most probably Fox’s Photographic Panoramic Views of Sandhurst—Pall Mall (undated) now in the Mitchell Library. Fox was a member of the Sandhurst Hebrew congregation in 1855. Also a Freemason, he was elected Worshipful Master of the Corinthian Lodge at Sandhurst in 1858.
After a brief partnership with Christian Ludwig Qwist at View Point in 1859, Fox moved to Melbourne. By 1862 he had established a photographic company at Collins Street with W. Vasie Simons . This, however, failed. Mrs Fox and the children had to be financially supported by her brothers, who finally made their help conditional on the promise that Fox would remove himself from their lives. He moved to Swanston Street, but his photographic practice never recovered. On 13 August 1866 he wrote to his wife from the Sydney and Melbourne Photographic Studio, Collins Street East, Melbourne, that he was lonely and penniless. A week later the Illustrated Melbourne Post published an engraving of The Melbourne Banking Company, Queen Street—from a Photograph by Mr Alexander Fox , but such work did not pay well.
Fox apparently hoped to change his fortunes by painting. 'I can paint so well that my former productions seem daubs’, he wrote to his wife: 'I have finished one this morning, that makes two I have done here on Sundays. I shall get paid for them this week’. The 1867 Melbourne Post Office Directory lists Fox solely as an 'artist’, but he soon reverted to photography. In 1867-68 he was in Sydney, employed by E. Montagu Scott to operate his photography studio, the Sydney and Melbourne Photographic Company, while Scott painted transparencies for the royal visit of the Duke of Edinburgh. Listed at Pitt Street in 1868, Fox then disappeared. His biographer, Len Fox, believes he may have perished at sea on his way to the New Zealand or American goldfields.
Frank Cusack
- Writers:
- Cusack (foundation biography), Frank
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
