Frederick
Vaudry Robinson was a leading pictorialist in Tasmania. He was first
apprenticed
to Stephen Spurling II’s
studio in Launceston and later worked for ten years for Percy
Whitelaw. Jack
Cato’s autobiography, I Can Take It, refers to their early
experiments with new pictorial processes and traditional toning
methods to achieve coloured images. Robinson was also a painter
and may have
studied under Lucien Dechaineaux.
He
retained his early interest in colour and was one of the expert colour
bromoilists. A one-man
show of Robinson’s monochrome and colour bromoils was shown
at Kodak Pty Ltd’s showrooms in Sydney in August 1928.
It
was probably around 1928 that Robinson set up a studio in Melbourne.
The studio failed and Robinson returned to set up
a studio in Launceston.
He was not a regular exhibitor and few examples of his photography
have survived.
above
text based on Gaël Newton's Silver & Grey Angus and Roberston, Australia 1980