Carte de visite photographs of two American opera singers who arrived in Australia in 1861 with the company run by Irish impresario William Saurin Lyster are included in the forthcoming sale of Douglas Stewart Fine Books, Melbourne .
From a well connected family, Lyster had been a sickly lad and was sent on a voyage to Australia to improve his health when he was 13 , which obviously worked because he went on to have an adventurous life that included time as a planter in Calcutta ,a volunteer in the Kaffir War , a soldier of fortune and an entrepreneur.
Prima donna Madame Lucy Escott (1827-1895) , a soprano , popular in America , more so in Europe and the United Kingdom, is shown here.
The other snap , below, is of tenor Henry Squires (1825-l907) who with Escott performed throughout Australasia in the l860s. The bookshop says the Australian music historian Harold Love commented: ‘Between them, aided by Lyster’s promotional flair, Escott and Squires created an audience for opera capable, on occasions at least, of packing the 3300 seat Royal, and came as close as anyone apart from( Dame Nellie ) Melba has ever done in Australia to making it a form of mass entertainment.’ (La Trobe Journal, no. 16, October, 1975).
Both studies were taken in Dalton's Royal Photographic Galllery ,Sydney. It seems the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, has two hand-painted copies , from Squires's personal photo album.
Squires , a great stage performer , married Escott in 1870 ; they moved to Paris . Upon her death in l895, he burned her diaries and returned to America.
(Americans, Opera , Irish).
