Charles Bayliss

(England, Australia 1850–1897)

Title

Surf, Coogee, Sydney

Other titles:

Surf on Coogee Bay five miles from Sydney

Year

circa 1880

Media category

Photograph

Materials used

albumen photograph

Dimensions

15.4 x 21.0cm image/sheet

Signature & date

Not signed. Not dated.

Credit

Purchased with funds provided by the Photography Collection Benefactors' Program 1999

Accession number

150.1999

Location

Not on display

Further information

In 1876 the poet Henry Kendall wrote about ‘wave-worn Coogee’, celebrating the wildness of the place: ‘jags and points disrupted, gaps and fractures fringed with light.’ Kendall’s picture of the turbulent coast of Coogee is in sharp contrast to the sun-filled and cheery beachscapes which Tom Roberts and Charles Conder painted there. Bayliss may have been familiar with Kendall’s verse, although the poetic notion of the ‘ever-restless sea’ was well established in 19th-century verse and art. The AGNSW acquired their painting of this title by W Lister Lister in 1892. Poetic and romantic allusions aside, photographs of the sea – ‘instantaneous’ photographs which demonstrated a photographer’s technical abilities – were not uncommon. As one reviewer noted about the genre: ‘several instantaneous views of scenes, into which water in a state of motion enters, are highly artistic and effective.’1

1. 1885, 'New Guinea memorial volume', 'Sydney Morning Herald', 9 Feb p 4

Bibliography (1)

7079 (Editor), Photography: Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection, 2007, 45 (illus.).