Lady Barkly

British botanist, Anne Maria Barkly née Pratt (c. 1838–1932) collected and drew plant specimens while accompanying her husband, Sir Henry Barkly, on his governing duties abroad. Following Sir Henry’s time as Governor of Victoria from 1856 to 1863, Lady Barkly accompanied her husband and his daughter by his first wife, Emily, to South Africa to assume the position of Governor of Mauritius (1863-1870). It was here that Lady Barkly corresponded with Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker at Kew Gardens about the plants of the island. In 1870, she journeyed to South Africa to join her husband in his newly appointed position as the Governor of the Cape of Good Hope. During their seven year stay on the Cape, Lady Barkly along with step daughter Emily Blanche Barkly made drawings of the plants that Sir Henry collected. Copies of their drawings of Stapeliae (odoriferous succulents in which her husband was very interested) were sent with Sir Henry’s descriptions of the living plants to Kew Gardens. Lady Barkly also collected plants herself, mainly pteridophyta. In 1875, she compiled and published A Revised List of the Ferns of South Africa. A set of her ferns was arranged at the Albany Museum in 1890. She is listed in the Dictionary of British and Irish Botanists, as is her step-daughter. In 1860, Nicholas Chevalier designed a fancy-dress costume for the new Lady Barkly, trimmed with sheepskin and gemstone nuggets, appliqued with fern motifs and accessorised with a lyrebird-inspired fan. In this carte de visite, Lady Barkly is depicted in day dress with double-puff bishop sleeves, her small, elegant hat with frill detail perched on top of her head. The detailing of her fur-trimmed shawl is reflected in the mirror behind, while her hands rest gently on a lace shawl with leaf motif.

The preeminent Melbourne photographic firm Batchelder & O’Neill had its origins in the studio founded on Collins Street in 1854 by the Massachusetts-born photographer Perez Mann Batchelder (1818–1873), who had come to Victoria after several years in California. Batchelder’s brothers Benjamin (1826–1891), Nathaniel (1827–1860) and Freeman (life dates unknown) joined him in Melbourne in February 1856. The firm promised ‘Portraits taken on Glass and Silver Plates by the Collodion and Daguerreotype Process, in the highest perfection of the art’ and ‘in a style surpassed by none in the colonies’. The studio also offered tuition in photography and ‘supplied [the trade] with apparatus and materials of every description.’ Perez Batchelder left Victoria in 1857 and another American, Daniel O’Neill, joined the business. By late 1864, Batchelder & O’Neill – with O’Neill as sole partner – had relocated to Swanston Street. O’Neill later moved to Sydney, where in April 1868 he advertised the availability of his carte de visite of the Duke of Edinburgh’s would-be assassin Henry O’Farrell a week before his execution. Meanwhile, Perez Batchelder had returned to Boston, where he died in 1873. By 1866 the old firm no longer existed, but other photographers traded under the names ‘Batchelder’s Portrait Rooms’ and ‘Batchelder & Co.’ from 1866 to 1895.

Purchased 2014