By Michele Leggott, with research support from Catherine Field-Dodgson Families keep the strangest things. For years now we have been looking at what we take to be the oldest document in Sarah Harris’s family history, a tattered and yellowing piece of paper pasted into the notebook that is full of intriguing items from the English Read More…
Tag: harris family
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…
And this is my picture: a 1906 painting comes to Wellington
By Russell Briant And this is my picture. Or how we got our own Emily Harris, ‘Kiekie, Tī Ngahere, Nīkau, Mikoikoi and Neinei’ (1906) My name is Russell Briant and Emily Cumming Harris is my 3x great aunt. Those of you who have read this wonderful blog may know that the Briant connection with the Read More…
The Misses’ Harris school in Nile St
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…
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…
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…
Sue Needham Writes
Sue Needham contacted us earlier this week, excited to find that our project and her Emily Harris research are a perfect fit. Michele and Betty will be in Sydney at the Mitchell Library in a few weeks’ time. With luck, Sue will fly from Brisbane to meet us and examine Emily’s handcoloured New Zealand Flowers, Read More…
Album Photographique
A family photo album is a set of busy intersections, composing and redirecting, grouping and collecting, full of identification, full also of implied knowledge. If that is your grandmother you will know who she is and that the squirming child in her arms is your mother, your father, an aunt or an uncle or even Read More…