Margaret Stoddart

The Landscapes of a Canterbury Flower Painter

JULIE KING

Margaret Stoddart belonged to the first generation of artists who were born in New Zealand, and was one of the first women in Canterbury to practise watercolour painting with professional purpose. At its distribution of prizes in 1893, the School of Art (eleven years after opening in Christchurch) claimed her as one of the distinguished students it had given to the Colony. By the eighteen-nineties, the local press were upholding her flower paintings as norms to follow for those aspirants whose leaves were painted no better than their flowers. The Lyttelton Times observed:
Flowers are nowadays the especial property of our lady artists ... Miss Stoddart was our first 'floral artist', and still remains facile princeps ... (1)

In 1940, Stoddart's reputation had become well enough established for E.H. McCormick to observe that 'Miss Stoddart's roses have become part of the tradition of New Zealand painting, as representative of the taste and achievement of their time as Gully's landscapes are of his'.(2)

Margaret Stoddart's early-won reputation as a flower painter and almost yearly showing of Roses at the Garden City's Society of Arts, have tended to obscure the contribution she made to landscape painting. Whilst not an innovator herself, she responded to the principal developments in landscape painting in New Zealand during a career that lasted fifty years. In the eighteen-nineties, as a member of the Palette Club, she was painting sketches with a direct and free technique; after a period in Europe she further developed this impressionistic direction by using more intense colour and vigorous brushwork. Before her death, fifty years ago in 1934, at a time when the dry Canterbury landscape provided fertile ground for painters, she was also seen as an artist who perceived the distinctive characteristics of that region.

Stoddart's career has to be set within the context of the development of art institutions in the city, and she was a student at the School of Art in its opening year. The early attendance registers are signed by Margaret and her three sisters, Mary, Agnes and Frances Stoddart. Judging from these signatures, there was nothing unusual in young ladies attending morning classes at the School. it would, however, presuppose a degree of family prosperity, and underlines the association of women with culture in early New Zealand, noted by Lady Barker.(3)

Opportunity for exhibiting work was provided by the recently formed Society of Art. Margaret Stoddart was elected to the Council of the Society as early as 1885.

There is, perhaps, nothing like success to prompt aspiration backed by application, and in 1889 she had won first prize for the Study of a Head from Life from the Auckland Society of Arts. In the previous year at Dunedin, she had won a life-drawing medal for A Beachcomber. This may be the drawing, titled, signed and dated, which is in the Collection of the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury. The atmospheric setting, with matagouri bushes, grass and rock, is only roughly indicated and the hardy, wiry figure firmly defined by dark crayon. It is a strongly conceived and executed drawing, related to nineteenth century European realist studies of types, as well as showing a deliberate attempt to create a distinctive colonial character.

This early drawing may well reflect her tuition in G.H. Elliot's life classes and the School's attempt to develop a tradition of figure painting which never really eventuated. Instead, Stoddart concentrated on flower and landscape painting and at the same time must have been strengthening her commitment to art. The arrival of Van der Velden in 1890 could only have reinforced a sense of professionalism which appears to have been already growing amongst a group of painters in the city. This emerges in the policies of the Palette Club. The Club was formed in 1889 and accounts of its shows and activities convey a sense of the serious purpose showed by its artist members, who included Madden, Sprott, W.M. Gibb, A.W. Walsh and Margaret Stoddart. The Lyttelton Times recorded:
It is three years since the Christchurch Palette Club was formed by half-a-dozen of the younger of the local artists. Its objects were to encourage original and serious work and studying from Nature, to raise the standard of artistic excellence and conversely to discourage ... the production of what are commonly known in art circles as 'pot-boilers'.(4)

Mutual support between painters and the development of their art was furthered by exchanging and exhibiting works from other centres, including Dunedin, Nelson, from the Mahlstick Club in Auckland and from Wellington's Art Club. Along with a sense of professionalism, one of the most important unifying factors in the Club, was the emphasis its painters placed on the validity of the sketch rapidly executed out of doors. In the summer months, the members went on trips and showed their outdoor work in exhibitions, forcing critics to acknowledge that 'sketches ... are of peculiar interest as representing, at first hand, the artists' impressions of Nature ... and may ... afford a truer insight into the impressions produced on his mind at the time than a carefully produced picture, done when not directly under her influence.'(5) Reviews mention that breadth of effect is regarded more than minute attention to detail.

Margaret Stoddart was an active member of the Club, and in 1894, showed a sketch of the Midland Railway Company, featuring the labourers' cottages, blackened trunks of forest trees, rendered with freedom, power and truthfulness.(6) A work of this time, Mt Torlesse looking across the Eyre (1896), demonstrates the free handling she was using for the water and shingle of the river-bed; and the successive strips of tussock and scrub are suggested by bold, summary touches of paint, including bright yellow for the flowering gorse.

It shows to what extent by 1896 she was in accord with the impressionistic watercolour sketches of Nairn, who was showing with the Palette Club in the early 1890s.(7) Alfred Walsh, a teacher at the School, was also using a free technique in his watercolours of the local landscape, and so reinforcing this growing stylistic trend in painting at the end of the nineteenth century. Both this stylistic direction and the consciousness of an artistic identity seem to have been concerns shared by Stoddart and a number of her contemporaries.

For Stoddart, confirmation of both aims came with a trip to Europe. At a time when the Old World set standards of taste for the New she was only one of many who left the Colony to develop their art and to work and exhibit in that larger framework they had heard and read about. in Canterbury in 1893, Miss Meeson was the first lady member of the Art Society who had left to pursue her artistic study in the Old Country.(8) Margaret Stoddart left four years later.(9)

That the trip provided a stimulus to her landscape painting is evidenced by the number of landscapes she exhibited in England and by developments in her work. A Cornish Orchard, which was probably done about ten years after Mt Torlesse looking across the Eyre, shows the vitality of surface which she introduced into her painting. After a number of fairly wet washes are laid on the paper, the trees' spring growth is conveyed expressively by building up a variety of lightly-painted, interwoven strokes. The whole surface of the work is enlivened by adding bold splashes and dabs of gouache for the explosion of white and pink blossom.

Margaret Stoddart showed a number of similar works proving her contribution to impressionistic painting in New Zealand. In 1913, at the exhibition of the Canterbury Society of Arts, she showed Old Homestead, Diamond Harbour, which depicts the cottage which her father had built after first settling at the bay and which was sold in 1913. A similar bold and free technique is used here to suggest the rush and overgrowth of nature taking over the pioneer cottage; variety of brushwork, again, creates an animated surface. The intensity of colour is heightened by juxtaposing touches of green and red; the yellow grass and the blue sky; and, of course, by the profusion of daisies in white gouache which adds to the over-all surface brightness. By experimenting with various techniques, she explored the potential of the watercolour medium for its suggestiveness and for its painterly effects.

Bush Fire, Paraparaumu, probably dated about 1909 according to a number of works from this area exhibited at the time, describes how the thick smoke from the fire blurs all definitions and the flames light up the sky with softly-tinged pink clouds. The paper has been treated with a succession of very wet washes, including yellow, brown and blue, worked on in different ways. On the left, she may have sponged the tonal washes to blend and merge together, so that the division of grass and bush, background hill and sky, tend to disappear. In the foreground, wet washes have been allowed to run down the surface of the paper and been worked over with light and rapid strokes of gouache. All of these works seek to capture an impression as well as emphasize the decorative effects of watercolour and gouache on the flat surface of the paper.

The results of working abroad are readily apparent. Unfortunately' the scarcity of records about her activities abroad preclude any clear reconstruction.(10) Her travels can be faintly traced from exhibited works. She visited Norway (her mother had come from there) as well as following the well-painted paths of her contemporaries through France and Italy. In England, a lot of time was spent at the artistic centre of Cornwall. In the early eighteen-eighties, a number of British painters had settled in Newlyn on the coast, where they developed the shared interests recorded by Norman Garstin twenty years later:
The, plein-airists were then in the ascendant ... The direct inspiration of nature was the creed of the day, and a feeling of reaction from academic traditions, and studio work as opposed to work on the spot, actuated most of the students. In the main, these young men were filled with this idea of a fresh unarranged nature to be studied in her fields, and by her streams, or on the margin of her great seas ...(11)

There are various reasons why Stoddart - as Frances Hodgkins, Dorothy Kate Richmond and Walter Wright, to name a few, had done - came to Cornwall: but one of them must have been enthusiasm for the artistic aims of the Newlyn painters. The public in New Zealand had also responded early on to this group by buying Stanhope Forbes's Preparations for the Market, Quimperlé in 1890.(12) In the same year, the art critic for the Lyttelton Times was praising the Newlyn painters, Stanhope Forbes, Adrian Stokes and Bramley for their luminous skies.(13)

Working in St. Ives in Cornwall may well have encouraged Stoddart to concentrate on her landscape painting. The large number shown at the Baillie Gallery, London, in 1906, supports this. An annotated catalogue at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which records 'fairly good bold work', lists a show of thirty-nine watercolours of which thirty-five are landscapes or general scenes. This was the last large show of her work in England and she returned to New Zealand in 1906.

Judging from Frances Hodgkins's comments on their lives in England times were hard for all of them. She records with admiration in 1902 that Margaret Stoddart was managing to live on £1 a week and resolves to learn from her.(14) it was probably a shared lack of success which prompted Frances Hodgkins's reference to her as 'poor girl' for selling only four watercolour sketches in 1902.(15)

A review in the Sunday Times of the exhibition by the New Zealanders, however, singles out Stoddart for special praise, comparing her free technique with that of such recognized masters as Robert Allan and E.A.Waterlow. It goes on to say:
She only needs to add ... the sunny impressionism of Arthur Melville to go very far indeed, and in her best work there is promise that these further achievements are within her essential gifts.(16)

The fact remained, however, that the gallery system in London set insurmountable hurdles for many able painters, and being a colonial and a woman only added an extra two handicaps to the race. The comparison between her painting and that of Melville indicates how it was seen by contemporaries in Britain, and was probably one that would have pleased 'and flattered her. He worked. with strong colours and experimented technically with the watercolour medium in a way that Frances Hodgkins described . . . 'at first sight you laugh, then out of a chaos of blots comes wonderful form and colour and you finally end by admiring very much indeed.'(17) In Melville's work, Margaret Stoddart could also have perceived a planar emphasis and decorative principles of composition.(18)

Other painters with whom she was associated include, of course, Norman Garstin and Louis Grier, who lived at St. Ives and painted coastal scenes full of atmospheric effects in a style influenced ultimately by Whistler. (19)

The importance of landscape to Margaret Stoddart and the nature and extent of her contribution in New Zealand to impressionistic painting in the earlier part of her career, seems never to have won as much acknowledgement as her flower painting. It is in the nineteen-twenties that her landscape painting showed further developments and won praise, particularly from the critic J. Shelley, for capturing the stark characteristics of the Canterbury and South island landscape. Searching for painting which dealt with regional features, he praised her for putting aside picturesqueness and a 'search for prettiness' and for revealing the bald austerity of the mountains, plains and dry river beds.(20)

In the work In the Mackenzie Country (c.1930), she continues to emphasize the surface of the paper, and her characteristic boldness remains in the compositional divisions, concentrating on foreground and background to stress the flat extension of the plain. But washes are fewer, and brushstrokes are more economical as well as gestural in their strong definition of foreground boulders and tussock, contrasting with the free and light drawing used for the distant, floating clouds. In her later work, she sought more rhythmic and calligraphic effects, and emphasized varied brushwork-a technique which M.T. Woollaston remembers her promulgating to students.(21) These lessons were ones which may well have benefited Olivia Spencer Bower, who, along with Cora Wilding, used to go on sketching trips with Margaret Stoddart.(22)

Both James Shelley and Sydney Thompson, in a joint article pubiished after her death, perceived the last important contribution she made to landscape painting.(23) Significantly, illustrations of two of her late landscapes were chosen to accompany their article.

1. Lyttelton Times, 17 November 1890, P. 5.
2. E.H. McCormick, Letters and Art in New Zealand, Wellington, 1940, p. 159.
3. R. Daiziel, 'The Colonial Helpmeet', New Zealand Journal of History, Vol. 11, No. 2, October 1977, p. 119.
4. Lyttelton Times, 29 August 1892, p. 5.
5. Lyttelton Times, 2 October 1890, p. 3.
6. Lyttelton Times, 10 September 1894, p. 6.
7. ' A style of realistic painting that is coming into vogue among English artists, and will before long find some imitators amongst us, is exemplified by the work of Mr J.M. Nairn, of Wellington...' Lyttelton Times, 10 September 1894, p. 6.
8. Lyttelton Times April 1893, p. 6.
9. C.S.A. An Exhibition of Past and Present Work by Miss M.O. Soddart in the Art Gallery. 1928.
10. Information from readers will be welcomed by the Art History Department, School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury, Christchurch.
11. M. Canney and N. Hopkins, Norman and Alethea Garstin. Catalogue, Penwith Gallery, St. Ives, 1978, p. 12.
12. 'EA. Waterlow's Sunny Hours, Stanhope Forbes's Preparing for the Market, Quimperlé, R.W. Allan's Departure of the Boats, Kirkwall, and W.D. McKay's November Pastoral were purchased by a committee of citizens for presentation to the town', J.H. Scott and W.M. Hodgkins, The Exhibition Art Gallery, Catalogue of the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition. Dunedin, 1890, p. 248 quoted by L. Tyler, British Painting in the New Zealand International Exhibition 1906-7, Research paper, University of Canterbury, Christchurch.
13. Lyttelton Times, 17 November 1890, p. 5.
14. E.H. McCormick, The Expatriate. Wellington, 1940, p. 69.
15. Ibid., p. 79.
16. Sunday Times, 12 October 1902, p. 6.
17. E.H. McCormick, 'Frances Hodgkins: The Path to Impressionism: 1892-1912", Art New Zealand 16, p. 30.
18. W. Hardie, Scottish Painting 1837-1939. London, 1976, plate 82.
19. She also studied with a painter, Charles Lasar, Christchurch Times, 11 December 1934, p. 4.
20. Art in New Zealand, Vol. 1, No. 4, June 1929, p. 264.
21. Toss Woollaston, Sage Tea. Auckland, 1980, p. 219.
22. A. Mitchell, Olivia Spencer Bower Retrospective, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, 1977.
23, Sydney L. Thompson and J. Shelley, 'Miss M.O. Stoddart', Art in New Zealand, Vol. VIII, No. 2, December 1935, pp. 97-101.