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A painter and professional photographer, Short was born in Surrey, England. He was taught to paint and draw by his father, Henry Short , and by attending classes at the Royal Academy School of Design in Somerset House, London. In 1852, aged eighteen, he came to Melbourne with his family in the Bangalore . In July 1856 W.W. Short exhibited his moving canvas Crimean War panorama, The Siege of Sebastopol , at Melbourne’s old Salle de Valentino, now renamed the Victoria Promenade. He first showed oil paintings in Melbourne the same year. At the Victorian Exhibition of Art, he showed Sunset View from Studley Park, Collingwood in the Distance , View of Flemington from Royal Park, with Cattle Grazing and Sundown. View Taken from Studley Park, with Richmond in the Distance (NLA).
In 1857 R.F. Norton offered Short’s Studley Punt on the Yarra for sale at the Geelong Mechanics Institute Exhibition, and that same year William himself showed three landscapes with the Society of Fine Arts in Melbourne. His too were for sale, the most expensive being Dight’s Mill (Royal Historical Society of Victoria) at £50.
None of the paintings sold. All reappeared in the window of Joseph Wilkie’s art supplies and music emporium in Collins Street in 1859. Meanwhile Short had painted a 'Grand Moving Panorama of the Indian War’, which he exhibited in July 1858 'at the Assembly Rooms adjoining M’Cowan’s City Hotel, for a few evenings only, prior to its departure for the diggings’.
In June 1860 he applied, unsuccessfully, for the position of artist on the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition (whose leaders were subsequently commemorated in a painting by his father). He was living at 158 Brunswick Street in Collingwood or Fitzroy in 1861, the year he showed two oils in the Victorian Exhibition of Fine Arts, The Yarra Bend from Studley Park and Distant View of the Lower Wannon Falls .
Short showed two oil paintings (possibly the same ones) at that year’s Victorian Exhibition held in preparation for the 1862 London International Exhibition. The 1861 view of the Yarra River signed 'William Short Jnr’ exhibited by Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne in 1984 is probably his Yarra Bend painting.
He turned to raffling his paintings in art unions to supplement his income and wrote, as his father was to do three years later, to Sir Henry Barkly seeking subscriptions. The Governor took two tickets in his October 1860 art union of two oil paintings, The Barrabool Hills, Geelong and The Yan Yean Reservoir (75 tickets at a guinea each). In February 1862 Barkly purchased two tickets for the 'large oil painting of the Yarra Bend taken from Studley Park in the late exhibition’ and in October took, as usual, two tickets (specifying that he wanted numbers 47 and 48) for a large oil of 'the Botanical Gardens, with a view of Melbourne’ (100 tickets at a guinea). William was suitably grateful.
Yet art unions even with vice-regal patronage did not provide much of a living. In 1863 William opened a photographic studio at 41 Collins Street West, Melbourne and the following year was calling himself 'artist in colors [and] photographic artist’. He exhibited only photographs at the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition, notably photographic portraits of children
Claiming long experience as an artist in drawing and painting as well as photography and offering both cartes-de-visites and vignettes, Short announced the opening of his new photographic studio at 37 Collins Street East in May 1867, having moved from 107 Elizabeth Street – Henry James 's former rooms.
In 1870 he was a founding member of the Victorian Academy of Arts and is said to have exhibited Picnic Point, Looking towards Brighton Beach at the academy’s second exhibition in 1872 (catalogue unlocated). Although he was the proprietor of the Melbourne & Berlin Photographic Company at 12 Bourke Street East, Melbourne in 1877-84, Short seems to have spent part of the time at least at Bendigo. It was from an address in Pall Mall, Sandhurst (Bendigo) that an offended Short wrote to the newly formed Victorian Artists’ Society in April 1880 indignantly declining (in the light of his former vice-regal patronage) the committee’s offer to present him to Governor Lock, adding the postscript: 'Be kind enough to erase my name as member of your society’.
Later, William Short exhibited nearly twenty Victorian landscapes at Stevens’s Art Gallery, Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, in 1898 and was reported as 'a pioneer painter, having arrived in the colony in 1852’. They included 'a bush track at Woodend, two moonlight effects, a view of the Yarra at Heidelberg, where the river is seen as its best’ and, 'the most ambitious’, a view of Hanging Rock. All 'vividly portrayed’, according to the Tatler , 'the weird melancholy of the Australian bush’.
William Short died of heart failure on 20 June 1917, j