Winter morning, Wellington Harbour

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

When the Scottish-born artist James McLauchlan Nairn arrived in Wellington in 1890, he brought with him first-hand experience of a cosmopolitan avant-garde practice to a colonial art scene in need of invigoration. Previously a member of the Glasgow Boys, a group that broke away from romantic landscape painting in favour of an impressionistic approach, Nairn encouraged local artists to work ‘en plein air’ (in the open air), to pay attention to the ordinary, to work in bold colours and to privilege the sketch over the more conventionally finished painting.

Tess was exhibited at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in 1893. Nairn’s large-scale oil painting takes its subject from Thomas Hardy’s 1892 novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and depicts the heroine, Tess, at one of her most contented moments, when, as milkmaid, she falls in love. She stands in a field laden with wheat and poppies, picked out in Japanese-inspired strokes and dashes. The overall effect evokes, as one newspaper reviewer noted, the ‘languor of an English summer afternoon imperceptibly stealing over you’.1 Winter morning, Wellington Harbour, a small watercolour sketch, is less grounded in literary pretensions, capturing instead the hushed chill of morning, as the sun rises behind a veil of smoke over a dappled sea.

Nairn was a provocative figure, generating some of the most dynamic critical debates in New Zealand’s art history - even penning glowing reviews of his own work under a pseudonym. Accused of ‘chromatic lunacy’ by one newspaper critic,2 Nairn privately retorted, ‘I shall always make the point of trying to outrage the taste of the ordinary public, as I do not want them to like my work’.3 Nonetheless, his work was admired and collected: fellow Scotsman and local businessman John Newton purchased several of Nairn’s more progressive paintings, including these, which were both subsequently given by his daughter, Mary Newton, to the National Art Gallery in 1939.

Rebecca Rice

1 New Zealand Times, 23 September 1893, p. 2.

2 ‘Art exhibition’, Evening Post, 22 July 1893, p. 3.

3 James Nairn, letter to Mabel McIndoe, 19 August 1898, in Victoria Hearnshaw, ‘James McLauchlan Nairn: The New Zealand years’, MA thesis, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 1991, pp. 148–149.