By Michele Leggott There was a longstanding tradition of teaching among the Harris women. It began with Sarah Harris teaching Sunday school soon after the family’s arrival in Taranaki in March 1841. Later Sarah established two elementary schools near the Harris farm in Frankley Rd in order to educate her own children and those of Read More…
News
Mr Manby, Professor of Music
By Michele Leggott The inscription on the headstone in Edwin Harris’s pencil sketch reads: ‘Sacred to the memory of Charles William Manby | Formerly of 85 Fleet Street London | Born 8th March 1809 | Died 11th April 1866 | Aged 57 Years | Let everything that has breath praise the Lord | Psalm CL:6.’ Read More…
Playing Snap with Edwin Harris
By Brianna Vincent I thoroughly enjoyed my part of working on Edwin Harris’s sketchbooks, one of the interesting parts of the experience being how it became an exercise in sustained déjà vu. The déjà vu would leave me carefully leafing through the pages and wondering if I had seen this building, this tree, this beach, Read More…
After the War: Edwin’s sketchbooks go live
By Michele Leggott We begin posts for 2020 with online publication of sketches by Edwin Harris from the period of the family’s relocation to Nelson after the loss of their son Corbyn in the Taranaki War of 1860. Our captions are provisional and we welcome improvements from those who know the Nelson region better than Read More…
2019 highlights
Setting up a research website in February this year to host source materials and edited publications was a breakthrough moment for the Emily Harris project. The website is a way to organise some of the research trails we are following in order to draw attention to Emily’s art and writing. It’s great to be Read More…
A new Emily Harris painting at Puke Ariki
Kathryn Mercer is remembering how she and colleague Mike Gooch spotted an Emily Harris watercolour among the items in the New Plymouth hospice auction earlier this year. It was an exciting moment, and within hours pictorial collections curator Chanelle Carrick was on her way to check out the painting and to ascertain whether or not Read More…
Emily writes to Harry Moore, 1910
Outside the hotel on Wentworth Avenue the temperature has hit 36 degrees. Sydney is burning: bushfires ring the city to north and west and an apocalyptic haze is turning the CBD sepia. We opt for a research day in our room and invite Sue Needham to come down with her big folders of Emily Harris Read More…
Dot Moore writes from New Zealand, 1910
Sometimes the voice comes from a long way off but it can still make powerful connections. In one of Sue Needham’s folders is a retyping of her cousin Graeme Griffin’s typed transcript of a letter written by Dorothy Moore (1896-1979) to her sister Constance around 1910. Dot, aged about 13, is writing home to Lismore, Read More…
Adelaide report
Lee Hayes is looking thoughtfully at the three single bound copies of Emily Harris’s New Zealand Flowers, Berries and Ferns in the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide. We can see that the dark blue leather of the original binding has been cut out and stuck on to cloth-bound boards that don’t quite Read More…
Sydney Report
‘It’s beautiful!’ Sue Needham is looking at the first plate of her great-great-aunt Emily Harris’s hand-coloured New Zealand Flowers, Berries and Ferns at the Mitchell Library in Sydney. She hasn’t seen the books before. The rich yellows of Ranunculus pinguis, the native buttercup, leap from the page. ‘And look how carefully she’s modelled those leaves,’ Read More…