Roses

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In 1940, six years after Margaret Stoddart’s death, EH McCormick observed in his centennial survey, Letters and art in New Zealand, that along with the still life of zinnias by DK Richmond, ‘Miss Stoddart’s roses have become part of the tradition of New Zealand painting’.1

Stoddart was arguably this country’s best-known painter of flowers. Born in 1865, and a foundation student at the Canterbury College School of Art, she acquired her reputation in the colonial period. The widespread interest in indigenous flora provided her with an incentive for closely observed studies of plants, and she embarked on numerous painting expeditions. In 1886 and 1891 she visited the Chatham Islands, and after meeting Australian flower painter Ellis Rowan, she travelled to Melbourne in 1894, where she held an exhibition.

In her still-life paintings Stoddart followed a traditional composition of an arrangement of cut flowers placed in a vase on the table. Over the following decades, she developed a range of impressionist and decorative effects.

Roses is a virtuoso display of Stoddart’s later watercolour technique in which the artist demonstrates her skill and control of washes in a dazzling play of reflections on the polished table and the loose mesh of rapidly applied and vigorous brushmarks that makes up the patterned background. This is one of her boldest and most accomplished flower paintings, and when the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts purchased it in 1930, it was the second still life of roses that the academy had acquired from the artist for its collection.

Stoddart developed her impressionist style in the United Kingdom and Europe where, based from 1898 until 1906 at the artists’ colony of St Ives, she began to concentrate on landscape painting. Shortly after her return, Old homestead, Diamond Harbour, c.1913 (Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū), a depiction of the artist’s birthplace, would become one of her best-known works. In the late 1920s she explored regional motifs, and her stark images of the South Island hinterland and robust handling of the watercolour medium confounded gender expectations and challenged critics to recognise the breadth of her subjects and styles.

Julie King