News

Antarctic panels revealed

By Catherine Field-Dodgson and Michele Leggott   Last month Michele reflected on Emily Harris’s missing 1906 sub-antarctic panel and wondered what it might look like:  We can make some guesses about the size and content of Emily’s second panel of Antarctic flowers, to date unlocated. Given her predilection for symmetry we can guess the second panel Read More…

Three celmisias and a white gentian: Emily Harris at the British Museum

By Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson The reporter from the Nelson Evening Mail is more than usually enthusiastic about the work on show at Emily Harris’s studio in Nile St East. Under the heading ‘Some Exquisite Paintings’ the range and ambition of Emily’s latest project is described in detail: Miss Harris has undoubted talent in Read More…

Thomas Kirk at Te Papa: the Campbell Island flora 

By Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson  14 January 1890  The Colonial Government Steamship Hinemoa reaches Campbell Island with botanists Thomas Kirk and Frederick Chapman on board. The steamer has visited the Snares and the Auckland Islands, travelling ever further south into the brief sub-antarctic summer since leaving Bluff 8 January on her periodic tour of Read More…

James Dall’s yellow rātā

By Catherine Field-Dodgson Many of Emily Cumming Harris’s artworks have disappeared over the past hundred years, but some paintings that we would love to see reappear are her studies of yellow rātā. Thanks to her diary and several newspaper articles, we know that Emily painted more than one version of the climbing yellow rātā vine Read More…

Looking for the 1906 paintings

By Catherine Field-Dodgson Recently we have been looking into the twelve large flower studies in oil that Emily Harris painted for the 1906-07 New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch. The Christchurch International Exhibition was an expansive display of nationalism: a way to promote tourism, products and a sense of colonial New Zealand identity to the Read More…

Constance Weyergang: Artist, Musician, Poet

By Michele Leggott Summer 1950. Constance Weyergang, 74, is looking at the black sand and sparkling waters of Ngamotu Beach in New Plymouth. The beach is adjacent to the port that serves Taranaki and both are sheltered by a breakwater. Among the swimmers and sunbathers Constance watches could be my young parents, engaged but not Read More…