John William Twycross was a pictorialist photographer
whose main body of work was produced between 1918 and  1932.
His work has recently been discovered. He left both original prints and glass plates.

  John was born in 1871 in Melbourne, Australia. He grew up surrounded by a large Collection of decorative arts and paintings kept in the "Art Wing" of his
parents' home in Elsternwick.

Subsequently he studied art at school, his ambition being to paint in Florence. This plan was thwarted by the land crash of 1889. He had to leave school early and thus worked at the Bank of New South Wales until retirement.  Nonetheless, in the years to come he continued to paint, inspired by frequent voyages by paddle steamer across Port Phillip Bay to visit his mother's family at Arthur's Seat, the cattle run they took up in 1851.

After his parents died , he continued to journey to the Peninsula and to paint there. In 1918 he purchased a Thornton-Pickard Westminster quarter plate camera, and set about documenting life at Arthur's Seat.

On the Bay, he photographed the sailing boats they passed, the passengers on the steamers, and the jetties and piers that they visited en route. Gradually he expanded his subject matter to Melbourne and its Docks, Still Life and Portraiture.

The photographer's original plates were developed in  the kitchen, and were then printed using an enlarger with a kerosene light source, a  large mirror  condenser  and soft focus lenses. The prints were generally bromoil on fibre paper, but daylight paper was also used  in a wooden holder to make contact prints using sunlight.

John Twycross used a Thornton Pickard Westminster quarter plate reflex camera. He worked in Australia.

    The originals shown here were printed on the kitchen table using a kerosene operated metal enlarger with a large mirror condenser and soft focus lenses. The paper holder was in a vertical position as the prints were exposed horizontally. Prints were generally bromoil on fibre paper, but daylight paper was also used in a wooden holder to make contact prints using sunlight.

     All images are available for purchase in a number of formats, including framed and unframed digital  prints and canvas prints wrapped onto frames.