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Artists, illustrators and photographers

Gilbert Percy Whitley (1903-1975)
Gilbert Percy Whitley was an ichthyologist, naturalist and historian. He joined the Australian Museum in 1922 as an illustrator and assistant to Allan R McCulloch. After McCulloch's death in 1925, Whitley was appointed Australian Museum Ichthyologist. He held this position until his retirement in 1964.

Whitley is remembered for the considerable accomplishment of building the Australian Museum's Ichthyology collection and as a prolific describer of new species.

Similarly, his publishing output was exceptional as was his illustrative and scientific work.

Image to the Right:
Structure of a seahorse
Hippocampus spp.
Gilbert Percy Whitley (1903-1975)
Australian Museum archives

Joyce K Allan (died 1966)
Joyce K Allan was the Australian Museum's curator of Molluscs and an extraordinary illustrator of Australasian and Pacific shells, mammals, fossils, spiders, crustacea, sharks, fishes, and shark eggs.

On her appointment as a temporary assistant in 1917, Joyce K Allan became the first woman member of the Australian Museum's scientific staff. During her career, she wrote newspaper articles and delivered broadcasts and lectures.

Allan was an exhibiting member of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales and is remembered in the names of several shells (Allanassa, Coralastele allanae, Rissoina allanae), a fish (Microcanthus joyceae) and an insect (Scotinophara allanae).

Photographs by Frank Bell on loan from the Manly Regional Museum

Frank Bell (1884-1923)
Frank Bell was a keen amateur photographer who worked at the end of the so-called gentleman era of photography. His photographs uniquely captured the atmosphere of a people and place long gone.

Despite the availability of new and simpler photographic technology, Bell chose to work with the glass plate. In 1974, his extensive collection of glass plate negatives was found forgotten in his brother's cellar.

Edward William Fevyer (1897-1969)
Edward Fevyer is most remembered for his recording of the sights and sounds of Sydney. Over many years, his all-seeing, telescopic camera eye put together a total of 23,000 feet of film - totaling nearly 20 films! Fevyer regarded his films as epic reflections of nature.

An engineering draughtsman by profession, Fevyer was an amateur artist who briefly studied with The Royal Art Society in Sydney. He worked mainly in pen and ink and created an individual and unorthodox -noughts and crosses' style of cross-hatched artwork.

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