AUSTRALIA

Antique Print & Map Room holds one of the largest and most systematically catalogued collections of antique Australian prints available from any specialist dealer including original works — engravings, aquatints, lithographs, and chromolithographs — spanning from the first European voyages of the 1770s through to Federation, the collection covers every colony and territory, and most major subjects within the visual record of colonial Australia.

Buyers searching for antique prints of Sydney will find the deepest holdings in the collection. Early views of Sydney Cove and Port Jackson from the First Fleet publications, harbour views by convict artists and naval officers, and the great lithographed panoramas of the 1840s-1880s are all represented. Antique prints of Sydney Harbour — particularly hand-coloured aquatints and lithographs from the 1820s through the 1850s — are among the most consistently sought items in the collection, and stock is regularly renewed.

Antique prints of Melbourne and Victoria span the pastoral years of the 1840s through the gold rush era and the boom decade of the 1880s. S.T. Gill’s goldfields lithographs, Eugene von Guerard’s landscape prints, and the bird’s-eye views of Melbourne produced during the land boom are all well represented. For buyers of antique prints of Tasmania — or Van Diemen’s Land as it appeared in the original publications — the collection includes early views by convict artists alongside the more widely distributed works of John Skinner Prout and the Admiralty survey draughtsmen.

Antique colonial prints of Queensland, South Australia, and Western Australia are stocked in depth relative to the available print record for each colony. The rarer states — the Northern Territory, the Australian Capital Territory — are represented where works exist. Aboriginal subjects, including portraits and cultural and ceremonial scenes produced during the period of early contact, are held and described with historical care.

The collection also includes antique goldfields prints covering the Victorian rushes of the 1850s, antique pastoral prints depicting station life, shearing, and droving, and antique prints of colonial towns beyond the capital cities — Ballarat, Bendigo, Bathurst, Geelong, and others. All works are originals from the period stated. International shipping is available.