Edith Marion Collier:
1885 to 1964

ROSS FRASER

An enterprising publication has been brought out under the aegis of The Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui. The occasion provides further ammunition for those who assert (perhaps misleadingly) that the 'provincial' galleries are setting the pace these days. (It is true however that the once broad flow of booklets from the metropolitan galleries has slowed to sporadic gushers.) This latest catalogue contributing toward the study of New Zealand art history is Edith Collier in Retrospect.

According to an introduction by the Gallery's director, W.H. Milbank, dated last November, the Gallery got together the exhibition and its catalogue to tour New Zealand with the help of the Collier family. Sponsorship for the tour and catalogue was arranged by the New Zealand Art Gallery Directors' Council and funded by the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council.

The colour photography and reproduction in this publication are up to high professional standards. Touching photographs from family albums help to eke out the essential background material and to recall the Victorian and Edwardian society from which these artists - bold spirits for their times - arose.

A more substantial artist, and a discerning one, Frances Hodgkins, knew the young painter in England during the first World War and gave some lessons. Edith Collier was a pupil for whom Ms Hodgkins predicted "a glowing future and who responded to her teaching' with the unswerving loyalty of the young - 'the Queen can do no wrong', as Frances expressed it, amused but none the less' pleased. . ." *

On the evidence of the illustrations the paintings are not all strong: but the best of them are worthy enrolments in the broadly post-impressionist tradition of painting toward which most of these expatriates and peripatetics veered.

An interesting essay by Janet Paul traces the artist's path from a spacious, agreeable middle-class childhood in late nineteenth century Wanganui, through to the first emigration to London in 1913 when she was twenty-seven (she enrolled at St. John's Wood School of Art); then charts the course of the decade of vital activity that was terminated by her return to New Zealand in December of 1921. An essay by Gordon H. Brown makes it clear that the years spent in Britain were to remain the most fertile period of her work.

Edith Collier, it has to be said, is numbered among those artists that New Zealand destroyed. After coming back to Wanganui she seems to have been persuaded by the prevailing climate of popular opinion to retreat to more conventional ground. (The portrait of her nephew Carey Collier is a sad academic echo of her former vitality.) Tragically symptomatic of such an attitude were her father's actions in deliberately destroying paintings and drawings of the nude.

There may have been consolation in the recognition of qualities in her work by other painters: but after the twenties she exhibited infrequently. Janet Paul records that an exhibition 'of 70 paintings, arranged in four groups to cover work in London, in Ireland, at St. Ives and in New Zealand, was shown in Wanganui in 1955, and at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, Wellington in 1956, when Edith, characteristically, managed to avoid the official opening'.

* E.H. McCormick, The Expatriate, Wellington 1954