Sadd, Henry Samuel (c.1811-93; English/Australian)
The Catholic hierarchy in Australia 1869
Collotype, 44 x 34 cm
Acquired, 1870
State Library of Victoria (H141655)
Sadd migrated from England to New York in 1840, according to Bénézit (where he is described as American). He may also have worked in partnership with a Canadian photographer named Andrew Halsey (documented in Montreal and Mexico in the 1840s).
He arrived in Sydney in 1853, and by 1855 had settled in Melbourne, specializing in mezzotint portraits based on photographs, as is the case here (the inscriptions indicate that the print relied on photos taken by a certain A.McDonald). Hand-written numbers identify the sitters, including, at centre left, James Goold, Catholic Bishop of Melbourne, the donor of several canvases to the Melbourne in the 1860s (for details, see linked entry). The central figure is John Bede Polding, Archbishop of Sydney and Metropolitan of Australia.
In an ecumenical spirit (?), this print was apparently acquired at the same time as another – apparently no longer extant or identifiable – of the Australasian Wesleyan Methodist Conference (Melbourne, 1864); but whether that was a print or a photograph is uncertain.
Refs.
Not listed in NGV 1894 or 1905
The SLV catalogue also notes two smaller-scale cartes de visite based on this image, acquired more recently
For Sadd, see the detailed biography by Thomas Darragh in Kerr Dictionary (1992), p.693, updated as https://www.daao.org.au/bio/henry-samuel-sadd/biography/ (last revised 2011), indicating that he was born in London; Bénézit 12, p.227; and AKL68 (2011), p.363, mentioning Andrew Halsey (for whom, see also Peter Palmquist & others, Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: a Biographical Dictionary, 1840-1865, Stanford U Press, 2000, pp.271-72; cited by Google Books)
The Wesleyan image, listed in the NGV’s unpublished list of pre-1905 acquisitions as no.468 (p.180.24-1, also acquired 1870), is not listed in the current SLV and NGV catalogues