William H. Bardwell, photographer, worked at various premises in Ballarat from 1858 until 1895. In 1859, he was in partnership with Saul Solomon; they exhibited portraits at the 1862 Geelong Industrial Exhibition and the 1863 Ballarat Mechanics Institute Exhibition. In 1863 the Argus reported that Bardwell had captured the laying of the foundation stone of the Sturt Street Burke and Wills memorial from the roof of the Post Office in Ballarat. In 1866 he established the Royal Studio, which offered spaces for ladies and gentlemen to ‘prepare themselves for the lens’, and by the following year he was offering to take pictures of ‘mining claims, views, buildings and country residences’ on commission. In 1868 he photographed Japanese men and women who were in Ballarat for a season of ‘feats of jugglery, balancing and dancing’. He exhibited photographs of Ballarat at the Intercolonial Exhibition in Sydney in 1870, offering prints at the substantial price of £6 each, and had a photographic panorama of Ballarat amongst his views of its buildings and streets in the Victorian section of the London International Exhibition of 1873. Bardwell’s photographs are in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the State Library of New South Wales and the State Library of Victoria. As a point of interest, one Mike Butcher, corresponding with National Portrait Gallery historian Sarah Engledow about the quick-change artiste Grace Egerton in 2011, mentioned that ‘William H Bardwell went broke funding a tour by Madame Ilma de Murska’ (renowned as the Hungarian Nightingale).
