Included in the 60 portrait photographs being offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books, Melbourne, spanning seven decades of Australian history , is the above rare l882 carte de visite of a woman dressed as a blind fortune teller in the studio of Richard Yeoman , a photographer and miniature portrait painter, at 139 Clarendon Street, Emerald Hills, South Melbourne ,
The bookshop describes the reserved offering as one of the more remarkable colonial studio portraits it has had the privilege of handling. The sitter is either in fancy dress (for a ball, perhaps), a theatrical costume.
It is from an Australian carte de visite album that belonged to Claude Thomas Harper (1858-1954). Harper was an accountant who commenced his career in Melbourne before becoming branch manager of the London Chartered Bank in Ipswich, Queensland and later in Wilcannia, New South Wales.
His album contained cartes collected in Melbourne in the 1860s by his parents, Henry Harper and Eliza Downes Harper (Prout), as well as other family portraits of later dates up to 1900.
There is a great 1878 shot of the American acrobat Hadj Hamo, known as "The Arab Wonder ," and his protege, Cassim the contortionist , "The Boneless Wonder."
A circa 1920 photo is of Larrakia children posing on a dead tree in Port Darwin.
