Charles A. Abbott

History

Charles A. Abbott was born in 1824, in Engand. He arrived in Hobart in 1850 which his mother and brother to join his emancipist father who was running a business as a clockmaker.

He was a cartoonist, lithographer, watchmaker and optician. He is thought to have provided many of the cartoons for the illustrated satirical magazine Ballarat Punch. The magazine was founded by a consortium of Henry Harris, E.C. Moore, Charles Abbott, and others.

Between 1857 and 1859 Charles Abbott took landscape photographs with his brother Alfred Abbott. He conducted some early experiments in colour printing using the chemicals potassium permanganate and potassium ferrocyanide.

He died in 1888.

Legacy

Alfred Abbott’s album (Crowther Library) contains several of Charles’s photographs, mainly stereoscopic prints of views and buildings in and near Hobart. A few are colour experiments, such as the blue half-plate Hobart Town from the Back of our Residence in Murray Street (showing the Abbott garden with its workshop and pear tree in the foreground).

Obituary

Mr Charles Abbott, one time proprietor and publisher of the Ballarat Punch, died in the Ballarat Hospital yesterday Mr Abbott was a clever caricaturist but a long martyrdom to rheumatic gout prevented him earning anything but a precarious livelihood from his pencil, and he has been on the verge of destitution for years. He was well connected, but refused to ask any assistance from his relatives in England.

THE Friends of the late Mr CHARLES ABBOTT are respectfully invited to follow his remains to the place of interment, the Ballaarat New Cemetery. The funeral procession will move from the Ballarat District Hospital This Day (Tuesday), the 5th instant, at 4 o'clock precisely. CHARLES MORRIS, Undertaker, Grenville street, and 160 Sturt street.

See also

Artists

External links

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--Clare K.Gervasoni 22:03, 2 February 2022 (AEDT)