Story and photos Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson Welcome to Emily Cumming Harris in New Zealand and Australia. 2025 is a big year for us and for Emily as Te Papa Press publishes our book Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris. Please keep an eye on the blog for updates about publication Read More…
Tag: botany
Emily Harris at Te Papa Press 2025
By Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson We are pleased to confirm that Te Papa Press of Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington will publish our Emily Harris book in 2025. Full-colour reproduction of Emily’s paintings and drawings will accompany a text that traces her art and writing across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our project restores the Read More…
Hector’s tree daisy: another Emily Harris oil
By Annabel Galpin In 2006 my mother Janet Briant was downsizing and moving to a retirement village in Whanganui. Before moving she went through the process of dividing many of her possessions between my sisters and me. Among these were several unframed artworks including two of Emily’s oils on strawboard, much in need of conservation. Read More…
Antarctic Flowers 1906 at Puke Ariki
By Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson, with research support from Runa Bhakta and Libby Baker Four tall spikes of ligusticum reach from the bottom of a rectangular panel towards the top of Emily Harris’s painting. The two largest have flower heads that resemble a carrot in flower, but with pink rather than white umbels and Read More…
Mrs Hardcastle was a splendid show woman
By Michele Leggott The Wanganui Chronicle reviewer offers a detailed critique of the still life and flower paintings of Mrs Hardcastle, wife of the town’s recently appointed resident magistrate: (72) is a full sized brace of French partridges, hung against the deal lined wall of a larder. If the frame of the picture had been Read More…
Mountain Flora: The Rendel Connection
We know where Emily Harris’s New Zealand Mountain Flora is now. It was an artist’s mock-up of the book she planned to publish, couldn’t afford and then sold to her English cousin Lord Stuart Rendel for his private collection. By way of the estate of collector Kenneth Webster, the Alexander Turnbull Library was able to Read More…
Emily at the Natural History Museum, London
As the onset of war in 1914 closed sea lanes to Europe and turned international scientific delegates for home sooner than planned, Emily Harris wrote to the Keeper of Botany at the Natural History Museum in London: I have been looking forward for months for the visit of the Scientific visitors to New Zealand & Read More…
Domett in the Bush
Alfred Domett has the last word on the English climate: ‘O horrible, horrible, most horrible.’ For the last month or six weeks dullness-cloud and fog – perpetual Scotch mist or rain – spitting not pouring. ‘Adam loved God – but went apart and dwelt in the shade’ – So Jeremy Taylor began one of his Read More…
Open Call for Emily’s New Zealand Flowers, New Zealand Berries, and New Zealand Ferns
How far did Emily Harris’s books of botanical lithographs travel? How many copies did she sign and hand-colour? These and other questions have come to the fore as we search overseas catalogues and collate the results, finding a surprising number of hand-coloured sets outside New Zealand. New Zealand Flowers, New Zealand Berries, and New Zealand Read More…
Houhere (lacebark) in Flower at Milford Sound
The Union Steamship company offered special excursion tickets to Melbourne at reduced prices during the International Exhibition of 1880-81. We don’t know which boat Emily Harris took to Melbourne but it is safe to say that she would have been travelling saloon class and paying the 16 pounds that gave her the option of a Read More…