Perkins and N.Z. art in the 1930s

Press, 20 December 1986, Page 23

Perkins and N.Z. art in the 1930s

An Artist’s Daughter: With Christopher Perkins in New Zealand, 1929-1934. By Jane Garrett. Shoal Bay Press, 1986. 192 pp. $22.95 (paperback).

(Reviewed by

Nell Roberts)

The English-born artist Christopher Perkins is today recognised for the part he played, all too briefly, during a difficult time in the history of New Zealand art. His achievements, and the impact that he had on the art of this country during the early 19305, have not as yet been fully assessed. This book makes no pretence to account for Perkins the artist, but does give the reader an intimate, unique insight into Perkins the man, his personality, his strengths and failings, and relationship with his family. This, in fact, is very much a family story.

However, it is not just a recollection of a close family as seen through the eyes of the artist’s eldest daughter; it

is also a perceptive and penetrating insight into New Zealand life through the early years of the Great Depression. This had been something that Perkins had set out to illustrate, but was never to see published. Jane Garrett has succeeded, half a century later, to in part remedy this. In 1929 Perkins, ever the artist on the move, uprooted his wife and family from the tranquility of life on Jersey to come to New Zealand where he had gained a position as an art instructor at Wellington Technical College. What he expected to find in Wellington on arrival was a "temperate Tahiti” with a vigorous, native art.

What he in fact found was a “strip of Victorian England” where the only subsidised artist was the City Organist whose principal official duty was to play “See the conquering hero comes” whenever the All Blacks returned

to New Zealand from on overseas tour.

The author was just 13 when she arrived with her parents, her younger sister and brother, and she vividly remembers the family’s struggle to cope, when “Da prophisied bankruptcy on being asked for sixpence, and mamma saved the washing up water.” Perkins’ “alarming modernity” quickly alienated him from Wellington’s establishment artists of the day forcing him to seek friendship elsewhere bevond artist circles. Jane Garrett warmly chronicles the lives and varied experiences of each member of her family over those five years spent in New Zealand, at first through city life in Wellington, then in rural Rotorua.

It is also the story of her own adolescence and the joys and anxiety of growing up. Her description of the mores of New Zealand society, both town and country, where life was still wedded to Victorian conventions, and art had no place for the majority, is engaging and is written with wry humour.

One of the only redeeming features of New Zealand society then, seems to have been that New Zealanders were New Zealanders first, and Maori and Pakeha second. Perkins’ hope of finding a Pacific Elysium for himself and his family in Rotorua was not to be, although he did find in the Maori community something closer to what he sought, but it was not enough to hold him.

To this country’s great loss, in January, 1934, disillusioned, he returned with his family to England. The memories of New Zealand were far from being happy for him. The author’s sharing of intimate experiences is rewarding for the reader as is the vivid picture of New Zealand life she has captured. This is an enjoyable book, well illustrated with numerous photographs and reproductions of drawings by Christopher Perkins which ably heighten the imagery of the text.