Catherine Field-Dodgson and Michele Leggott

In January we received an intriguing email from archivist Katherine Pawley at the University of Auckland. ‘It just leapt out at me,’ she told us, indicating a link to a tall skinny painting by an unknown artist at Webb’s auction house in Auckland. As soon as we clicked on the link we knew what we were looking at. Katherine’s instincts were spot-on: this was another of Emily’s large 1906 oil paintings, and it hasn’t been seen in over twenty years.

We have been searching for this panel since first reading about it in a 1906 newspaper article. New Zealand Liliaceae featured prominently in the Nelson Evening Mail’s list of the paintings that Emily was sending to the International Exhibition in Christchurch that year:

By to-day’s steamer Miss Harris, of Nile-street, forwarded 12 oil paintings to the Christchurch Exhibition. The collection has been made at the request of the West Coast Executive, and will be displayed in the West Coast Court. The paintings reflect great credit on the artist, who is already widely known in connection with her productions of New Zealand flowers and birds. The collection includes three panels, — clematis indivisa, New Zealand mountain flowers, and New Zealand liliaceae — and also paintings of yellow kowhai and bell birds, Whau, entelea arborescens, gentians, kiekie, nikau, red neinei, turutu, senecios, pohutukawa, manuka, tainui, everlastings, honeysuckle flowers, rata (scarlet). Miss Harris will also have two panels of Antarctic flowers in the Nelson portion of the art gallery. (Nelson Evening Mail 9 Oct 1906: 2)

Then we found the panel mentioned in a contemporary auction record. New Zealand Liliaceae sold in 2002 for $358 at Dunbar Sloane in Wellington. Quite a story emerged when we realised that well-known art and ephemera collector John Perry must have purchased the painting in 2002, bundled it into his van and driven it back to ‘Global Village Antiques’, which he housed in the old Regent Theatre in Helensville. Perry died in 2021 and his vast collection – the equivalent of four tennis courts – is now being catalogued and slowly brought to auction by Webbs. Emily’s panel was being advertised for sale at Webb’s as part of Perry’s estate, alongside other fascinating artifacts that included road signs, shells and folk art cat sculptures.

Team Emily pored over the un-named and undated photo in the January auction catalogue. We always tread carefully when it comes to artist attributions, but were certain that the red paint markings that we could see in the lower left-hand corner would read ‘EC Harris 1906’, and that once enlarged, the writing in the lower right-hand corner would reveal the title. After a flurry of emails to the auction house, these details were confirmed along with the measurements and materials: 1170 x 410mm, oil on canvas, framed and without glass. Webb’s updated their catalogue entry accordingly and Michele went to their Auckland auction rooms to see the painting in person.

Of the six big oil paintings recovered so far, New Zealand Liliaceae is most similar in style and composition to the 1906 work now owned by Emily’s great-great-great-nephew Russell Briant. But it also contains the greatest number of flowers and berries that we’ve ever seen in an Emily Harris artwork. She paints phormium flowers, a slender stem of dianella berries, two stems of white rengarenga flowers, golden bulbinella flower heads, cream-coloured Cordyline banksii flowers, astelia flowers and two stems of red supplejack berries. The plants are depicted in a natural setting, with a slip of pale blue sky and white clouds at the top of the tall and narrow painting.

Emily was almost certainly using Joseph Dalton Hooker’s 1864 Handbook of the New Zealand Flora to categorise her plants, as her painting contains flora that fall under Hooker’s ‘Order VII. LILIACEAE’:

The various family groups under the order are:
1. RHIPOGNUM
2. CALLIXENE
3. CORDYLINE
4. DIANELLA
5. ASTELIA
6. ARTHROPODIUM
7. ANTHERICUM
8. PHORMIUM
9. HERPOLIRION

Phormiums, dianella, astelias and supplejacks have all since been reclassified and no longer come under the order Liliaceae. But Emily’s 1906 grouping of plants is correct for its time. She has a library of plant images to call on when she embarked on her mega-paintings for the 1906 International Exhibition in Christchurch. And this particular painting reprises many earlier works in a new setting (large panel) and medium (oil).

The double frame with a gilt insert is not original, to judge by the simple wooden frames we have seen on other works Emily sent to Christchurch. New Zealand Clematis and Flowers from the Antarctic Island, both at Puke Ariki in New Plymouth, retain on the back a Nelson framing label and pricing information in Emily’s hand. (She wanted ten guineas for each panel.) When it was at Webbs in January, New Zealand Liliaceae had only John Perry’s business details and a catalogue number on the reverse, and the lower part of the frame appeared to be damaged.

We are delighted to report that Emily’s Liliaceae painting is now safely in the collection of a museum, where it will undergo some much-needed restoration work and we hope to visit it soon along with Harris descendants. Meanwhile we remain ever curious and watchful to see what other treasures might come to light from the John Perry estate.

Not for the first time we wish that a rediscovered work could tell us more about where it has been. In this instance, we are lucky to have insights from a range of art professionals and collectors who knew John Perry and wrote memorials after his death in 2021, commemorating an extraordinary passion for many different kinds of art and object.

Briar Williams:

If you’ve been anywhere in the art world in New Zealand in the past 50 years, you will have come across John F. Perry. New Zealand’s artistic and cultural landscape was greatly diminished, when John Perry the artist, obsessive collector, ex museum curator, arts writer for AASD and other publications but most importantly friend / mentor to many, passed away at home above his shop Global Village Antiques in the old Regent Cinema in Helensville, West Auckland on 6 June 2021.

Jack Ross:

It was a real shock to hear, earlier this week, that art historian, curator and antique dealer John Perry had died. It seems like forever that I’ve been driving up to Helensville periodically to check out his immense horde of vintage treasure: books, ceramics, furniture, pictures, prints, and everything in between.

In the early days, it was still possible to enter the body of the auditorium, and to get some sense of the sheer size of his collection. For many years now that part of the building has been closed off to the public, however, with only the front rooms accessible even to the most agile visitors.

The second-to-last time we saw him, he invited me upstairs into his apartment, and I got some sense of how he lived there, surrounded by pictures and curios, with his rooftop garden out the front, there on the outskirts of the ancient Kauri kingdom of Helensville.

Mind you, it didn’t seem too bad a place to live out your days – his apartment had a slightly Latin American air, as if he were one of those retired Colonels in a García Márquez novel, watching the rains come and go across the sinuous flatlands of the Kaipara.

Given John Perry’s extensive knowledge of colonial art, we can be certain he recognised Emily’s New Zealand Liliaceae when it came to auction in Wellington in 2002. Did he wonder about its size and medium in relation to Emily’s better-known watercolurs? Did he realise the panel was part of a larger exhibit from 1906? We don’t know. But we can be grateful for his custodianship of the panel in Helensville and imagine with Jack Ross the painting’s secluded life on the edge of the Kaipara Harbour.