Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson

Why did Emily Harris produce so many large oil paintings in 1906? The question has been on our minds since first realising that the oils signed and dated in red at lower left or right are part of an exhibit Emily sent to the International Exhibition in Christchurch that year. Why so many? Why so big? And why in oil?

Some of these questions have answers, others don’t. We know Emily was commissioned to paint twelve works for the West Coast Court of the exhibition, three panels and nine studies on strawboard. We know also that she produced two panels that hung as a diptych in the art gallery at the Christchurch exhibition. We know that many of the plants she painted for Christchurch reprise earlier, smaller renditions in watercolour. And we know that she got the job done in an astounding nine months, late January to early October 1906.

We don’t know how Emily funded the materials to produce her fourteen mega-paintings, though West Coast Commissioner George J Roberts may well have had a hand in it. He certainly covered their transport costs to and from Christchurch. And the mega-flora of the Subantarctic islands, a prominent feature in Emily’s art since first encountering specimens of the outsize plants in 1890, explains her choice of metre-tall panels on which to paint them life-size. But exactly why the mainland plants received similar treatment is a mystery.

Perhaps the solution lies right in front of us, as obvious today as it must have been when the works were displayed almost 120 years ago. They are huge, and it is always their size that elicits a first response. Annabel Galpin was given the oil her parents Phil and Janet Briant had stored away in a cupboard because it was so large. She acquired and restored an oil of similar dimensions when her sister Judith had no room for it. Russell Briant picked up his painting from a trader in Rai Valley and could barely fit it into the boot of his SUV for the return trip to Wellington. Brianna Vincent’s relatives stored her painting at their home in Nelson until a family trip could be arranged to drive it to Auckland. At Puke Ariki in new Plymouth, Team Emily saw curators Chanelle Carrick and Natasha McKinney wrangle two of Emily’s panels into view. ‘So big!’ we said. Exhibition size, in fact.

And this is the key. Emily was sending an exhibition within an exhibition to Christchurch, putting the full force of her passion for indigenous flora on display. Look, the paintings say. We are right here. Look at us. A tour de force all together, a site of impact individually. One panel on a wall takes over the room. In an auction house Emily’s panel stands out among the items on display. Standing beside it, the scale of Emily’s ambition becomes abundantly clear, as does her pleasure in being able to bring her plants and flowers up close and personal.

There is one more vector to explore in Emily’s decision to work on a grand scale in 1906. It seems entirely possible that the exhibits for Christchurch represented a comprehensive bid for financial security as well as artistic recognition. Pricing on the reverse of the panels at Puke Ariki reveals that Emily was asking ten guineas apiece for them. That’s 50 guineas for the five panels that went to Christchurch, and perhaps 45 or 50 guineas for the nine studies on straw board. We imagine that 100 or so guineas might have covered costs at Nile Street and left a comfortable sum in the artist’s bank account. But discovering just how many of the paintings sold in 1906 is an almost impossible task in the absence of sale records for the exhibition.

We present here the big paintings so far recovered alongside the people whose human scale is an important indicator of what each painting is up to. A grainy photograph of the two Subantarctic panels hanging side by side in the art gallery of the International Exhibition, tells us that viewers had to crane their necks to make out the big diptych at the top of the wall. Despite this, the panels exert a now-familiar pull. As with Emily herself, they are like the active verb to be and to do, too necessary an appendage to be left out’.