GROUNDWORK
GROUNDWORK
THE ART AND WRITING OF EMILY CUMMING HARRIS
MICHELE LEGGOTT AND CATHERINE FIELD-DODGSON
PREVIOUS PAGE: Emily Cumming Harris, Melicytus ramiflorus, mahoe, or hinahina, 1890–1900, watercolour, 353 x 296mm. Alexander
Library, B-018-013
For Emily and her sisters
She is the female speck in the history of texts. And she is the scout of its presence.
— Rachel Blau DuPlessis, The Pink Guitar
CONTENTS
Finding Emily: a prologue 9
01. The fine girl 23
02. Mapping and painting 37
03. Aunt Emma 55
04. The lighted windows 71
05. The active verb 89
06. Holbrook Place 105
07. 34 Nile Street 119
08. The missing work 143
09. Flowers, Berries and Ferns 161
10. The family exhibitions 189
11. Mountain Flora 203
12. Subantarctic flowers 219
13. Scientific gentlemen 251
14. The mega-paintings of 1906 275
15. Caves, eclipses and comets 291
16. Moores and Weyergangs 315 Scouting: an epilogue 333
Emily Harris exhibitions 348 Text references 350 Bibliography 366
Acknowledgements 373 About the authors 377 Index 378
Emily Cumming Harris, Calystegia, Leptospermum, Wahlenbergia and ferns, 1882, watercolour, 306 x 261mm. Puke Ariki, A65.644
Finding Emily: a prologue
As the world turned upside down in August 1914 and scientific delegates from the northern hemisphere sailed for home sooner than planned, Emily Harris, 77, wrote to the keeper of botany at the British Museum:
I have been looking forward for months to the visit of the Scientific visitors to New Zealand & now this dreadful war has altered everything.
I am a New Zealand artist & for a great many years have restricted my work to N.Z. subjects, flowers, birds, ferns, berries, grasses etc.
In 1894 I sent three books to the Botanical Department of the British Museum for which I received a letter of thanks, you may have seen them, Flowers Berries & Ferns, I do not remember if they were coloured as numbers were sold uncoloured but later I coloured a great many by hand.
I have been hoping to show you & Dr F. O. Bower the very large collection of original paintings I have in my Studio in oil & water colour large & small paintings finished pictures & panels – also portfolios of rough sketches the work of a long life devoted to making better known the lovely things more difficult to obtain each year.
I am not a botanist but botanists have frequently sent me rare plants if they thought I had not got them.
Many of my paintings have found their way to England & elsewhere. As a child I lived in the bush for some years & so became familiar with the forest trees & flowers & their manner of growth, & have also camped out many times.
Emily Cumming Harris, Mako-mako, Aristotelia racemosa, watercolour, 286 x 213mm, part of ‘New Zealand Flowers’, 1900. Alexander Turnbull Library, E-790-q-004
year & forbidden by the doctor to touch a pencil for twelve months. At the end of that time he entered the office of Uncle Rendel and became a civil engineer and surveyor. Father was born in 1806 the date of the picture would fit in with the one he painted at 19 years of age.
How proud he would have been if he could have known of this and I know of no more curious thing than by this means his name should be remembered in Old Plymouth where he was born.
In 2019 we were able to see Edwin’s painting in the off-site store of the Plymouth Museum and Art Gallery and then to visit the church itself. The painting is framed in gold, a family treasure commemorating the church as it appeared in 1825, looking down the central aisle from behind the altar rail. St Andrew’s is the Anglican church where Sarah married Edwin Harris in 1833 and where their first child Corbyn was baptised in 1835. Three-yearold Emily and her family probably attended a service there on Sunday 8 November 1840 before embarking for New Zealand a few days later. *
Fire and sword, chaos and ruin. Emily’s mother wrote to her sisters after the fire that burned down the family’s first dwelling in New Plymouth in May 1841. The letter outlines some consequences of that disaster:
The loss by the fire was a very serious trouble to us. The few settlers had nothing to sell or give & the store required money for goods which had to be earned first. So I collected a great many burnt articles & made cloth shoes for the children & many little things sewed together came in useful until we could receive an outfit from England, which arrived twelve months after & when the box was opened what delight it was with the dear children standing round exclaiming as each article was taken out. Oh! That’s for me. That’s for Baby, that’s for papa & Oh! what a nice dress for mama etc etc.
A century later in 1941, in Marton in the Rangitīkei, Sarah’s granddaughter Gretchen Briant was soldering up tins of butter, honey, dried milk and fruitcake for her relatives in ration-strapped Britain. The pattern of long-distance family support had come full circle. Her relatives were warm in their thanks. One of them wrote: ‘It is difficult to get butter and sugar – your last lot of butter that I tasted was delicious and my mouth waters at the suggestion of honey, which I love immoderately and is very difficult to get.’
Edwin Harris, Interior of St Andrew’s Church, c.1825, oil on canvas, 662 x 526mm. A discreet signature, ‘Ed. Harris’, appears at lower right on a collection box. The Box, Plymouth, England, PLYBX.1920.247
MAPPING AND PAINTING 02
What he wants to do is draw and paint; what he must do is survey and map.
When the Harris whare near the beachfront in New Plymouth burned down in May 1841, Edwin’s surveying instruments were lost along with almost all the family’s possessions. The blankets that were to pay Māori guides for the trip to Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland to meet Captain Hobson were gone, and in June Edwin accepted chief surveyor Frederic Carrington’s offer of work for the Plymouth Company.
For £2 a week he cut lines marking the transfer of land previously controlled by Te Āti Awa people into Company ownership. When the work was done, Carrington’s maps would show a squared-off representation of the negotiated whenua, its northern boundary the coastline, western boundary a line running south from Ngā Motu Sugar Loaf Islands, eastern boundary a few miles beyond the Waitara River, southern boundary edged by bush blocks that might one day become farms.
In the meantime, October 1841, Dr Henry Weekes selected a 50-acre suburban block at Te Hēnui and subdivided it for sale to his fellow settlers. Edwin Harris bought Lot 28, a 2-acre section fronting the northern side of the Devon Line not far from Te Hēnui Stream. He was also able to buy the doctor’s portable timber house when Weekes left the settlement early in 1842, moving the house and his growing family to the eastern boundary of the town. Emily Harris, almost five years old, recalled the move and the birth of her sister Frances: ‘I can just remember being sent to stay at a friend’s house but not liking it I walked home again but I never forgot that I was looked upon as a very naughty little girl. Someone however told me that I had a new little sister. The next I remember we were living at the Henui, baby was two years old and had not been weaned & the difficulty was how to manage, she used to scream so.’ Emily also recalled a later incident that nearly ended in tragedy at the Waiwhakaiho River, a little over a kilometre from the Harris family home:
PREVIOUS PAGES: Detail of Emily Cumming Harris, White-flowering mānuka and pōhutukawa, 1906, oil on straw board, 810 x 520mm. Galpin collection, Pauanui. See full image on page 276.
OPPOSITE: Emily Cumming Harris, Gaultheria antipoda – Snowberry, plate 17 in ‘New Zealand Mountain Flora’, 1894–1910, ink and watercolour, 262 x 207mm. Alexander Turnbull Library, E-001-q-018
FLOWERS, BERRIES AND FERNS
There is a blank, something is missing. The first part of Emily Harris’s diary finishes in November 1886 near the end of the hardbound notebook in which it is written. The diary resumes in August 1888 in another hardbound notebook and continues to the end of 1890, with letters spilling over into early 1891. That there was once another notebook between these two is evident from the sticker marked ‘T’ on one and a sticker marked ‘V’ on the other in the alphabetical sequence of material that came to the Taranaki Museum in 1961. What has happened to ‘U’, a notebook that should contain Emily’s narrative of events between 1887 and early 1888?
There is a moment that looks like a resolution of the puzzle. Museum director Rigby Allen writes to Emily’s great-nephews Philip and Godfrey Briant in 1961: ‘Many thanks for the material you recently deposited with the Taranaki Museum. We are extremely pleased at any time to receive written matter in connection with the “Edwin Harris” family. The letter of introduction to Captain Hobson is most important whilst the dictionary and diary are of special interest to the Taranaki Museum.’ The Hobson letter and Edwin’s Māori dictionary appear in the accession records but there is no mention of a diary. Emily’s 1887–88 diary has become an archival phantom.
Some things we can piece together. The school continues to supplement the family income, but Emily is now offering extra-curricular lessons to children and adults. ‘Miss Harris prepared to receive pupils, drawing and painting’, reads one advertisement from January 1887. It is followed a few days later by a more detailed offer that reflects Emily’s success in London the previous year: ‘Miss Harris, Nile street East, is prepared to receive pupils for drawing and painting in Oil or Water Colors, on Satin, Velvet, Wood, Terra Cotta, or other materials.’ At the beginning of 1888 the sisters extend their classes: ‘The
PREVIOUS PAGES: Detail of Emily Cumming Harris, Kiekie (Freycinetia banksii), nikau (Rhopalostylis sapida), five finger (Pseudopanax arboreum) and karaka (Corynocarpus laevigata) in fruit, 1879, watercolour, 389 x 506mm. Alexander Turnbull Library, C-023-002. See full image on pp. 138–39.
OPPOSITE: Emily Cumming Harris, Rangiora (Brachyglottis rangiora), 1887, watercolour, 730 x 520mm. Reproduced as a Turnbull Library print in 1968. Alexander Turnbull Library, C-024-007
Emily’s three books New Zealand Flowers, Berries and Ferns have a pictorial card cover and the cover image is repeated inside the book on the title page. Nelson, HD Jackson, 1890. Field-Dodgson collection, Wellington
Miss Harris has won at various colonial and international exhibitions show that she is particularly fitted for this work, as her paintings have always been considered not only artistic, but botanically correct.
Georgina Hetley’s Native Flowers of New Zealand and The Art Album of New Zealand Flora by Sarah and Edward Featon were sumptuous chromolithograph productions issued first in parts and then as single volumes between 1887 and 1889. Emily’s uncoloured lithographs are modest by comparison: three slim books to a set designed and marketed as ideal for posting to family and friends in England. They could be purchased individually or as a set of three books, but they were never bound together and sold as a single volume.
Although Emily’s lithographs are not large hardbound books like those of Hetley and the Featons, they do share the same concern for botanical accuracy and aesthetic composition. As curator Rebecca Rice notes, ‘The frontispieces reinforce her ambition, as they feature, in each volume, an artist’s palette, with foliage intertwined through the form and the border, creating a clever trompe l’oeil effect.’
The production of the books, however, becomes a major headache for Emily as subscriptions fill slowly and time to work on the drawings has to be snatched between teaching and domestic duties. The school is not earning enough income and Emily blames her lack of success in Melbourne for the falling away of her private pupils. Self-doubt follows hard upon her list of the troubles at Nile Street:
And that brings me back to where I began, not having enough to pay the bills. Not that they are large, the fact is that they are so small that I should not like to tell anyone the various items, also the want of a few shillings now & then for a concert or lecture, a cab or a train. Having the shillings makes life pleasant, the want of them makes things hard.
But after all I have written above, the worst blow has been the failing to win a prize or to sell anything at the Melbourne Exhibition. It has done me so much harm, if I had got a prize I should no doubt have got pupils again.
I have got two poems ready for two books, but I do not get on with the illustrations. Although I know exactly what I want, I cannot work them up properly. I often wonder whether my hand is becoming less skilful or whether pain & worry have made me less capable of doing steady work.
Emily is 52 and whatever strains the work is imposing, the evidence of the finished drawings suggests her fears are groundless. The poems that were to accompany each of the three
SUBANTARCTIC FLOWERS
As Emily Harris packed a side-saddle and sketching materials for her expedition to Taranaki Mounga on 20 January 1890, the Colonial Government steam ship Hinemoa was tying up at the export pier in Port Chalmers. She had returned from the year’s first cruise to islands far to the south of the New Zealand mainland, restocking government depots and landing sheep and goats for the use of castaways. On board was botanist Thomas Kirk in the company of lawyers Frederick and Martin Chapman, their colleague Henry (Harry) Dillon Bell, naturalists Andreas Reischek and Henry Travers, and five schoolboys who had enjoyed themselves shooting birds and plundering nests for scientific purposes. The Hinemoa’s hold was full of dead birds and blown eggs destined for museum collections throughout the country. It was also packed with boxes of earth transporting the rich harvest of subantarctic flora gathered by Kirk and Frederick Chapman.
The voyage of January 1890 fulfilled Thomas Kirk’s dream of visiting the subantarctic islands. He wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker, retired director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and revered author of the earliest flora of the region: ‘more than forty years ago reviews of “Flora Antarctica” laid fast hold of me, and kindled an intense desire to see Chrysobactron Rossii, Pleurophyllum speciosum, and Celmisia vernicosa in their native soil. After long waiting, the hasty pleasure has been realized, and I hope to enjoy it again before I die.’ Kirk goes on to list his specimens against the comprehensive collections made by the young Hooker as HMS Erebus and HMS Terror visited the islands on their way to Antarctica in 1840. He also speculates about the variants he has found of species well known to them both.
Behind the Linnaean names are the strange and wonderful mega-herbs for which
PREVIOUS PAGES: Detail of Emily Cumming Harris, Aralia lyallii (The Snares), 1890s, watercolour, 364 x 545mm. Alexander Turnbull Library, C-023-003. See full image on pp. 228–29.
OPPOSITE: Emily Cumming Harris, Pleurophyllum speciosa. Painted from a plant brought [by Mr E. Lukins, from Adams Island, Auckland Islands], 1896, watercolour, 637 x 510mm. Alexander Turnbull Library, collection of Alexander Horsburgh Turnbull, C-024-003
CAVES, ECLIPSES AND COMETS
It comes and goes in Emily Harris’s diary: evidence that her art is not confined to flowers, berries and ferns. ‘We had a few weeks ago a picnic up the Dun Mountain tramway,’ she writes in 1886, ‘I took a sketch from there of Nelson, that & the nikaus I have since finished.’ In 1889 a community camping trip to Hira near Cable Bay provides several days of sketching. ‘On Monday morning, after breakfast, Frances, Nina Jones and I set off to sketch the view from the Cable Bay Road,’ Emily writes. ‘On our way back I was very much struck by a tall dead tree, where some bush had been felled by the side of the road. I had wandered on by myself so I sat down & began a sketch of that, & got in a good bit before the other two came up.’ She works on the sketches in the days that follow and at the close of the camping trip she observes: ‘My first feeling when I returned home was that I could not endure to live in a house.’
There are other escapes from the daily round in the 1890s and early 1900s. Emily travelled up the coastline northwest of Nelson and her sketching expeditions resulted in a number of paintings for exhibition. She visited Te Matau Separation Point, which marks the divide between Te Tai-o-Aorere Tasman Bay and Mohua Golden Bay. In 1895 a review noted: ‘Miss E. Harris shows a still life study, and a picture of Separation Point, which command attention.’ In 1901 Emily contributed shoreline views and coastal birds to a marine-themed exhibition:
Miss E. C. Harris also shows originality in her choice of subject – ‘Sand Pipers’ is taken from life, the artist having had on the Clifton, Takaka, beach an exceptional opportunity of studying these waders. The sea and distant hills in the background in themselves make a pretty little picture. ‘Stranded,’ depicting one of the finny tribe, and the ‘The Curve of the Boulder Bank’ are other marine subjects from the same brush, and Miss Harris also shows ‘A Study in Fir Trees.’
PREVIOUS PAGES: Detail of Emily Cumming Harris, Comet, 1901, oil on board, 339 x 436mm. Nelson Provincial Museum, Bett Loan collection, AC807. See full image on pp. 308–09.
OPPOSITE: Emily Cumming Harris, Taurepo Rhabdothamnus solandri, 1899, watercolour, 500 x 330mm. Jude Rainey was given the painting by her mother-in-law Molly Griffin, who inherited it from her mother May Griffin. Rainey collection, Nelson
Exhibitions Text references Bibliography Acknowledgements
Exhibitions 1869–1922
Emily Harris had work accepted for international exhibitions in Sydney (1879), Melbourne (1880), Christchurch (1882 and 1906), London (1886) and Melbourne (1888). A selection of exhibitions is included here, some self-organised and others to which Emily Harris was a contributor between 1869 and 1922. Catherine FieldDodgson’s 2003 thesis, ‘In Full Bloom: Botanical art and flower painting by women in 1880s New Zealand’, has an appendix that lists and describes Emily’s exhibitions between 1879 and 1899. We have extended this foundational work and present the following exhibitions list, aware that more shows may come to light.
1869 Otago Fine Arts Exhibition, Dunedin (12 February–10 April)
1873 Horticultural and Industrial Exhibition, Nelson (26 November–2 December), silver medal for flower painting; honourable mention for velvet cushion
1873–74 Hokitika Exhibition (26 December–4 February), silver medal for best painting of New Zealand flowers and berries
1877 Exhibition of Art, Science and Industry, Whanganui (19–30 August)
1879–80 Sydney International Exhibition (17 September–20 April), first order of merit, silver medal for painted collection of New Zealand flowers
1879–80 Art Treasures Exhibition, Nelson (24 December–2 January)
1880 YMCA Exhibition, Nelson (6–7 July)
1880–81 Melbourne International Exhibition (1 October–30 April), first order of merit, bronze medal, for wild flowers, painted from nature
1881 Nelson Industrial and Art Exhibition (22 December–7 January)
1882 Auckland Society of Arts (20–26 April), first prize for hand-painted fan
1882 New Zealand International Exhibition, Christchurch (10 April–15 July), second order of merit for silk drapes, table-tops, flowers
1883 Auckland Society of Arts (11–18 April), certificate for hand-painted fan
1883 Fine Arts Association, Wellington (23 July–1 August), first prize for hand-painted fan
1883–84 Christchurch Industrial Exhibition (17 December–2 February)
1884 Auckland Society of Arts (24 April–2 May)
1884 Fine Arts Association, Wellington (24–30 June)
1884 New Zealand Art Students’ Association, Auckland (15–27 October), third prize for mantelpiece drapery
1885 New Zealand Industrial Exhibition, Wellington (1 August–31 October), first order of merit, silver medal, for screen, in watercolour on satin; third prize for handpainted table-top
1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London (4 May–10 November)
1887 Nelson Art Exhibition (11–16 April)
1888–89 Centennial International Exhibition, Melbourne (1 August–31 January), honourable mention for fancy work
1889 Nelson Art Exhibition (21–24 May)
1889 Personal / family exhibition, Nelson (29 November–2 December; 6–7 December)
1890 Personal / family exhibition, New Plymouth (16–18 January)
1890 Personal / family exhibition, Stratford (6 February)
1890 Personal / family exhibition, Nelson (14–18 August)
1890 Personal / family exhibition, Wellington (14–18 October)
1892 Jubilee Fine Arts Exhibition, Nelson (1–6 February)
1893 Fine Arts Exhibition, Nelson (4–9 September)
1893 Bishopdale Sketching Club Annual Exhibition, Nelson (20–23 December)
1893–94 West Coast Industrial Exhibition, Greymouth (20 December–20 January), two gold medals: study in oil titled Bread and Cheese; handcoloured set of New Zealand Flowers, Berries and Ferns
1895 Bishopdale Sketching Club Exhibition, Nelson (11–13 September)
1896 Personal exhibition, Nelson (23–31 December)
1899 Personal / family exhibition, New Plymouth (22–30 April)
1900 Bishopdale Sketching Club Annual Exhibition, Nelson (11–23 June)
1901 Suter Art Society Winter Exhibition, Nelson (24–31 July)
1902 Jubilee Fine Arts Exhibition, Nelson (1–12 February)
1906 Personal exhibition, Nelson (28 January–3 February)
1906–7 New Zealand International Exhibition, Christchurch (1 November–15 April)
1907 Suter Art Society Annual Exhibition, Nelson (13–26 May)
1908 Suter Art Society Sketch Exhibition, Nelson (8–9 June)
1908 Suter Art Society Annual Exhibition, Nelson (7–13 October)
1909 Suter Art Society Exhibition of Sketches, Nelson (23 February)
1910 Suter Art Society Sketch Exhibition, Nelson (11 August)
1912 Suter Art Society Sketch Exhibition, Nelson (13 June)
1913 Suter Art Society Sketch Exhibition, Nelson (2 October)
1914 Suter Art Society Exhibition of Sketches, Nelson (15 May)
1917 Suter Art Society Sketch Exhibition, Nelson (16–17 October)
1919 Suter Art Society Sketch Exhibition, Nelson (14–16 March)
1919 Personal exhibition, Nelson (21–25 April)
1919 Suter Art Society Sketch Exhibition, Nelson (21–25 May)
1919 Suter Art Society Sketch Exhibition, Nelson (3 September)
1920 Suter Art Society Sketch Exhibition, Nelson (22 April)
1921 Personal exhibition, Nelson (14–26 February)
1921 Suter Art Society Sketch Exhibition, Nelson (11 March)
1922 Whangarei Arts & Literary Society, Art Exhibition (23–25 March)
1922 Suter Art Society Sketch Exhibition, Nelson (7–11 September)
Reproduced as a
Acknowledgements
The Emily Harris project could not have been completed without the assistance of those who researched with us. They should now come forward with Emily as she steps into a century not her own but (we hope) recognisable in its urgent attention to the precarious state of the natural world she loved dearly and painted for so many years. As a child she lived in the bush and knew every berry and flower around her. As an old woman she was sure of the value of her achievement, ‘the work of a long life devoted to making better known the lovely things more difficult to obtain each year’.
Throughout the research and writing process we have been warmly supported by staff at Puke Ariki Museum in New Plymouth, the Alexander Turnbull Library and Archives New Zealand in Wellington, the Suter Art Gallery and Nelson Provincial Museum, and Special Collections at the University of Auckland. Staff at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa answered our cascading questions and digitised their holdings on request. Staff at Kew Gardens, the Natural History Museum and the British National Archives in London mined their colonial records for us. Staff and affiliates at The Box, Plymouth Museums Galleries and Archives, showed us Edwin Harris’s student painting of 1825 and found time to take us over the family’s ancestral ground in Plymouth, Devon. And staff at auction houses Art + Object, Chiswick Auctions, Christie’s, Dunbar Sloane, Lipscombe Auction House and Webb’s located hard-to-find catalogues and sale records. In Tasmania historians Alison Alexander and Tony Marshall guided our search for traces of Emily Harris’s years in Hobart. They also sent us to the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, the State Library of Tasmania and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Art dealer Brian Groshinski and paper conservator Camilla Baskcomb between them pieced together for us the retrieval of Edwin Harris’s optical amusement from an auction room in Melbourne to its startling restoration in the lab at Auckland Art Gallery. John
GROUNDWORK: THE ART AND WRITING OF EMILY CUMMING HARRIS
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