Kline did not indulge in a great deal of advertising, but did convey his prices in direct competition to Hart and Audet on a few occasions. [4]
Another new gallery was announced in October 1864, at a different High Street location opposite Rourke & Son, Saddlers. Kline was “now prepared to take likenesses in the best style.” [5]
Image : Maitland Historical Society
Kline was involved in legal action in November 1864, relating to a breach of the Registration Act, when Anne Seal claimed to be married to Balthazar Kline and registered him as the father of her child. [6] Later evidence revealed that Kline lived with Anne, but they had not been officially married. [7]
Advertising photography at Jerry’s Plains in 1871, “staying for a short time”, suggests Kline spent some time as a travelling photographer. The death of his son, Henry Kline, in 1942, was recorded in the Northern Star indicating that as a boy, Mr [Henry] Kline accompanied his father, who was a travelling photographer, through the north of New South Wales and also as far as the Gulgong Diggings." [Northern Star 20 Jul 1942, p 4].
Flooding proves to be a problem as well as a business opportunity in 1874, Kline reducing the price of portraits 6 for 4s. 6d., or 8s. per doz., ‘ as a consequence of the Late Disastrous Flood’. [8]
The advertising columns of the Maitland Mercury again display the photographers’ competition for patronage, with Moss, Curtis and Kline appearing sequentially. [9]
Kline’s studio name “River View Portrait Gallery” first appears in the Maitland Mercury in October 1874 [10] and remains until at least 1877. [11]
In December 1876 Kline advertises that “Having charge of all the negatives taken by Mr. Nicholas, at Hart’s Portrait Gallery, persons wishing more copies of their portraits can have some, by applying at the River View Gallery, opposite Rourke and Sons, Saddlers.”
The River View Portrait Rooms were the target of theft in May 1877, the news description providing an opportunity for imaginative observation of the equipment in use at the time. [12]
...the large photographic apparatus had been lifted bodily up and the camera belonging to it gone. He afterwards found it down the bank of the river at the rear of his promises, minus the lens. The apparatus is used for copying large likenesses, and is said to be the largest in the district; it was fitted up and attached to a room which is under lock and key. The person, whoever he was, had apparently been armed with a screw driver, for the apparatus had been forced from its original place, the camera extracted, and the lens screwed off. The police have been made acquainted with the fact, and we hope to see the offender brought to justice.
