Johannes Theodor Charles Troedel ( 1836 - 1906)

Lithographic printer born in Hamburg, Germany, to Carl Auguste Troedel (Trödel) and Maria, née Buck. After apprenticing under his father in Denmark and working briefly in Norway, he was recruited in 1859 by Melbourne printer A. W. Schuhkrafft, alongside artist Robert Wendel. The pair arrived in Melbourne aboard the Great Britain on 5 February 1860 and completed a three-year term with Schuhkrafft.

In 1863, Troedel established his own press in Collins Street, producing The Melbourne Album on a European press still preserved today. He collaborated with Wendel and artists such as F. Cogné and later with Baldwin Spencer, whose zoological illustrations for the Horn Expedition were among Troedel’s finest coloured lithographs. Naturalised in 1869, Troedel married Julia Sarah Glover the following year. They had eight children. From the 1880s he was active in the Victorian Master Printers’ Association and sat on the printing industry’s wages board by 1900. Deeply involved in Melbourne’s cultural scene, he worked with artists including Nicholas Chevalier, Arthur Streeton, Lionel Lindsay and Percy Leason. Streeton, once his apprentice, later spoke of Troedel with fondness. Troedel expanded to Sydney in 1877 and partnered briefly with Edward Cooper in 1891.

He died in Prahran on 31 October 1906. His sons Walter, Rudolph and Ferdinand continued the business. Though not Melbourne’s first lithographer, Troedel was its most accomplished. His firm’s legacy includes a wide array of high-quality posters, labels, and book illustrations. In 1968, Troedel & Cooper Ltd donated their collection to the State Library of Victoria, now held in the La Trobe Library as a significant record of colonial visual culture.