Enclosed in a gilt frame.
In 1886 The Maitland Hospital Committee commissioned local photographer Fred Bowman to create a portrait of Elizabeth Morrow ‘the late lamented matron of the institution’. This was a mark of the hospital’s esteem for Morrow who had overseen significant improvements in the cleanliness, management and nursing care in the hospital over the previous fifteen years. The aim was to hang the portrait ‘with the portraits of other benefactors’. It was ‘handsomely enclosed in a gilt frame’.
In 2021 a framed photographic copy of the portrait is hanging in a corridor in the administrative block. It is also an image that has been reproduced a number of times.
The portrait highlighted Morrow’s significance: it was the first – and probably the only – time in the nineteenth century that the hospital included a woman among the portraits commissioned to hang on the walls of the hospital.
There were a number of these portraits. The Maitland Mercury reported their commissioning and sometimes provided descriptions.
Maitland Mercury reports on the Maitland Hospital’s portraits of Morris Cohen, Edward Close, Edward Capper, John Pierce, Thomas Howe, Joseph Abbott, David Cohen and Isaac Gorrick.
As with the portrait of Morrow, none of the original works are still in the hospital. There is, however, a composite work combining photographic copies of a number of the portraits. In 2021 it is hanging in the hospital’s Education Centre.
Framed photographic of portraits commissioned by The Maitland Hospital in the nineteenth century.
(Maitland Hospital Collection 53).
Top (l to r): David Cohen, Elizabeth Morrow, Edward P. Capper
Middle: Joseph P. Abbott, Dr Robert J. Pierce
Bottom: Dr Thomas C. Howe, John Pierce, Thomas Evans
Date created: 13 February 2021
Updated: 16 August 2021