Queen Street, looking south from between Fort and Customs Streets
ca. 1885 (George Valentine) - 2022
Click on image to toggle transition between two photographs
Historical image: George Dobson Valentine | Queen Street, Auckland | Scottish National Portrait Gallery
Click here for a fullscreen version of this transition, and here for a short animation of these images.
Auckland War Memorial Museum date this Valentine photograph to 1883 for their print of this image. Auckland Art Gallery suggest ca. 1885 for their copy. The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, whose version is used above, do not venture a suggestion.
In the late 1880s the Dutch-Belgian artist Jacques Carabain had visited Australia—and perhaps New Zealand—at some stage acquiring a copy of this Valentine photograph, which he used as the basis for his 1889 painting Queen Street, Auckland seen below, presumably made once he was back in Europe, and now in the collection of Auckland Art Gallery.
Click on the image of Carabain's painting below to toggle a transition between it and Valentine's photograph, the pair scaled as close to a best-fit registration as I could obtain. Clicking back and forth seems to reveal a couple of interesting differences in perspective: Firstly, Carabain has lowered the viewpoint from the elevated position above street level that Valentine positioned his camera. Secondly, when looking at the left side of the street there seems to be a perceptible lateral shift of the viewpoint, as if Valentine's camera had been moved to the right, reducing the foreshortening of the buildings. But the perspective of the buildings on the other side of the street doesn’t seem to follow suit, so I suppose Carabain constructed his own, slightly different scheme when laying out his painting's perspective lines (in addition to lowering the viewpoint).
