With Alfred Bock at The City Photographic Establishment

An Apprentice Wanted – 1863

Sennotypes and oils by Alfred Bock held at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Top: Self portrait and signature
Lower from left to right: Mr Crouch; Mrs Crouch; Unknown Man

Thomas J. Nevin answered an advertisement for an apprentice at Alfred Bock’s studio, the City Photographic Establishment, which appeared in The Mercury on 7th July, 1863.

Alfred Bock’s trade advertisement in Walch’s Tasmanian Almanac, 1864

Portrait of a standing child by Alfred Bock ca 1863
© The Private Collection of John and Robyn McCullagh 2005-2007 ARR.

The verso of this portrait of a standing child bears Alfred Bock’s studio stamp for the City Photographic Establishment which is identical in design to one of the stamps adopted by Thomas Nevin while apprenticed to Bock in the early 1860s, and later when he bought Bock’s studio and stock, The City Photographic Establishment, in 1865.

See also these entries:
Alfred Bock’s Stock in Trade for details of the sale, plus items of studio decor listed at The Table with the Griffin-shaped Legs. Nevin’s early experiences of Port Arthur are detailed in Alfred Bock & Thomas Nevin at Port Arthur showing Bock’s photography of personnel at the prison in 1864.

Left: Thomas Nevin stamp; Right: Alfred Bock stamp

The stamp (below) shows the early bare design of the photographer’s initials “A.B.” encircled by a belt with buckle, the motto in Latin “Ad Altiora” (towards the heights) withing the belt’s circumference, and a kangaroo perched on top. The studio’s address lies outside the design.

This is an earlier Alfred Bock studio stamp dated around 1857 when he first set up the City Photographic Establishment at 140 Elizabeth St. Hobart Town, complete with glass house studio. More of these cartes are held here at The McCullagh Collection.

A fuller biographical account is given in The Dictionary of Australian Artists: painters, sketchers, photographers and engravers to 1870, edited by Joan Kerr(1992 MUP).

Left: Biographical entry in the DAA, Joan Kerr (ed) 1992
Click on image for readable version
Right: Daguerreotype of Alfred Bock (in Kerr, Private Collection)