Catherine Field-Dodgson and Michele Leggott
We’re excited to reveal that Emily Harris’s 1906 New Zealand Liliaceae panel is now in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. The museum was the successful bidder in the auction at Webb’s in January and the painting has been fully registered with its own accession number. Emily’s large botanically-themed oil sits neatly in the collection alongside her letters to James Hector, a set of her beautiful hand-coloured books and a single botanical specimen she collected for botanist Thomas Kirk.
The team at Te Papa placed the panel on display at our book launch, alongside copies of Emily’s books, so that everyone attending could admire them in person. The panel rested on a table with a little pillow supporting the top of its frame. It was incredibly special to see up close a painting that has been hidden from public view for more than twenty years. And there’s nothing quite like standing in front of one of Emily’s large oils to ask questions like ‘what is she presenting in this work?’ and ‘how did she ship 14 of these big paintings to Christchurch?’
Another question posed to Rebecca Rice by Canadian visitor Barbara Tomlin was ‘how will conservators preserve the panel?’ (The short answer: section by section and very carefully.) Barbara then commented on Emily Harris’s resemblance to another Emily—the generation-later Canadian painter Emily Carr (1871 – 1945), who travelled around British Columbia capturing the grandeur of towering fir and arbutus trees. Like her New Zealand counterpart, Emily Carr was inspired to paint and write about the natural world and she struggled for recognition as a female artist in a colonial society.
New Zealand Liliaceae is the first painting of Emily’s that Te Papa has acquired and we hope it marks the beginning of more of her works making their way into the light again. We have now traced five of the oils that Emily exhibited at the 1906 International Exhibition in Christchurch, and there are another two that are strong contenders for belonging to the same exhibit. These big paintings are spread across the North Island in different collections, but when they are placed side-by-side they impress the viewer with their size and the botanical bounty within their frames. Emily’s plants take up space. They also stretch beyond the geographical bounds of the West Coast Court where twelve of the paintings were displayed, and we wonder what commissioner George Roberts thought when he opened the box from Nelson containing Emily’s works.
One day we hope to see a re-creation of just how these big paintings might have looked on the walls of Emily’s studio as she walked the reporter from the Nelson Evening Mail around them on the day before shipping her immense exhibit to Christchurch 9 October 1906.
That the reporter was bemused by his tour of the exhibit seems clear from the rather muddled list of botanical names in his story, which ran first in the Mail of 8 October. Emily was in with a list of corrections the moment the evening newspaper appeared and the corrected story ran again next day with apologies to the artist.