Pioneer artist

Press, 4 December 1979, Page 8 (Supplement)

Pioneer artist

Charles Blomfield: His Life and Times. By Muriel Williams. Hodder and Stoughton, 1979. 183 pp, index $22.93. The Pink and White Terraces near Rotorua were destroyed by the eruption of Mt Tarawera in 188 G. They had been known to Europeans for only a generation, but had been dubbed “the eighth wonder of the world.”

In fact, few Europeans ever saw the terraces for the centre of the North Island was still a wild, seldom travelled region. That gave special importance to the work of the handful of travellers who had visited the area and left a record of what they saw.

Charles Blomfield has been remembered as the artist who captured with the greatest skill the delicate colours and traceries of the terraces. Whn they were destroyed, several of his paintings were on show in Britain at a London and East India Exhibition and he suddenly achieved unexpected recognition.

Indeed, he continued to paint versions of his “terrace” works for another 30 years or more, working from at least 12 different views done while the terraces still existed. Blomfield was a painter for almost all his life in New Zealand, from the 1860 s until his death in 1926. His popularity declined in his later years as styles in landscape changed. Only recently has he come back into popularity. He is said to have painted at least 2000 pictures in all.

Muriel Williams, a granddaughter of Blomfield, has gathered together a collection of the painter’s letters and journals to tell the story of a pioneer traveller and artist

who often followed only a few steps behind the first explorers of New Zealand’s hinterland. Sometimes travelling was so difficult that Blomfield could do no more than make small sketches of what he saw, and then work these up into paintings when he returned to his studio. A fair selection of his works, of North and South Island views, are included in this book in coloured reproductions of generally good quality. He was a self-taught painter and the standard of his work varied greatly. At his best, he is deligtful, evoking the calm of a kauri forest which he called “nature’s cathedral,” or capturing the subtle shades of the southern lakes. Nearly a century after the Tarawera eruption, a specially appealing aspect of Blomfield’s work and writings is his early concern for the threat which civilisation posed to the beauties of New Zealand. He was one of the country’s first conservationists who wrote: “I have never ceased to be thankful for two things. One is that I was born with an intense love for the beautiful in Nature, and the other that I came to New Zealand before the hand of man had spoiled most of its natural beauty.