Walter S. Syer illustrator, is best known for his pencil portraits of prominent figures in Sydney and was active from the 1880s until the early years of the 20th century. He appears to have spent all his life living on Sydney’s lower north shore. He was born and died at St Leonards, but lived for some years in the 1890s at Alfred Street, North Sydney.
The earliest record of his work is a strange little ink drawing of four views of Quong Tart held in the Mitchell Library. This is dated ‘8.1.88, 10.9.87 (12), 8.1.87 (7) and 'Sup. 87’’. He was on sufficiently friendly terms with David Scott Mitchell to be the author of the drawings later used by Lionel Lindsay as a source for his posthumous portrait of the great collector. Syer was also on confidential terms with the publisher George Robertson and in 1895 may have been involved in the decisive move that initiated fully professional literary publishing in Australia on a profit-sharing or royalties basis. He may have helped in some way with the production of A. B. Paterson’s collection The Man from Snowy River (1895): the Dixson Library, SLNSW copy (89/568) is inscribed: ‘To Walter Syer, with the Publishers’ compliments & thanks’.
Syer assisted in the early stage of selection of contents for Henry Lawson’s _While the Billy Boils _(Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1896). His 1896 drawing of Henry Lawson is in the Dixson collection of the State Library of New South Wales. Sir William Dixson commissioned Syer in 1902 to illustrate his copy of the luxury issue of Lawson’s verse collection of 1896, In the Days When the World Was Wide (no. 27 of 50 copies). This copy, now in the Dixson Library, State Library of New South Wales(DL 89/571), has about 50 pencil drawings by Syer, mostly sketches of bush characters. He also began to illustrate his own copy (no. 12 of 25) of the luxury issue of the Paterson volume; this copy passed to Dixson (as DL 89/568).
Syer illustrated Charles White’s History of Australian Bushranging (1900) published by Angus & Robertson. His photographs, ‘Sidelights of old Sydney in the nineties’, were reproduced in James R. Tyrrell, Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney: The Fascinating Reminiscences of a Sydney Bookseller.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
Eggert
Joanna Mendelssohn
fishel
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2013
