african adventures in the art collection

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One of our most interesting ‘while we are closed’ activities is James’ framing project. Every time I’m in the collection store there is an intriguing assortment of work from the Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust (HBMT) fine art collection out of their crates.  Douglas pointed out this work to me last week as I’m doing some research into the work of New Zealand artists in North Africa in the early 20th Century.

Dobie, B. North African Coast, Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust/Ruawharo Ta-u-Rangi [6398

The plate on the frame reads: “North African Coast” by B. C. Dobie. Presented to H Guthrie Smith Esq

I rather liked this scene of a bright orange tent, pitched under the shifting shadows of a cork tree, looking out on olive trees and the dazzling blue of the Mediterranean.

The artist is New Zealander, Beatrix Charlotte Dobie (1887 – 1944).

Beatrix must have been a rather intrepid and determined woman to travel in this part of the world in the 1920s and 30s. I found myself curious about her; and the connection inferred by this painting with Hawke’s Bay farmer, naturalist and author Herbert Guthrie-Smith.

Beatrix Dobbie was born in Whangarei in 1887, daughter of Herbert Dobbie, a well-known stationmaster, botanist and writer. In 1911 she travelled to London with her friend Esther Barker (later Hope) to study painting at the Slade School of Art, under Henry Tonks. It was at this time she changed her last name to Dobie.

Muriel Wyman and Beatrix Dobbie, Mangere, c 1910. Photograph reproduced courtesy of Mangere Historical Society, Manukau Research Library, MGE: I, 2, no. 31

With the outbreak of the First World War she and Esther volunteered for the Red Cross and were stationed in Malta, and later at the New Zealand transfer camp in Codford, England. After the war she returned to New Zealand and exhibited regularly at the Canterbury Society of Arts.

The connection to Guthrie-Smith is here discovered, as it turns out that she illustrated his wonderful book Tutira: the story of a New Zealand sheep station, first published in 1921.

Cover of Tutira (detail) by H. Guthrie-Smith, Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust/Ruawharo Ta-u-Rangi [15419

Guthrie-Smith writes in his preface: “My thanks are due to Miss Beatrix Dobie for her physiographical sketches, and for her careful and accurate restorations of the old-time pas of the station. I consider myself most fortunate in having secured her services.”

Dobie, B. Te Rewa in Tutira by H Guthrie-Smith, Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust/Ruawharo Ta-u-Rangi [15419

The painting must have been presented to Guthrie-Smith by her in remembrance of this collaboration, Guthrie-Smith in turn gifting it to the HBMT before his death in 1940.

In 1926 Beatrix went abroad again, this time on a painting tour of Africa, and while in Tunisia she met and married Rene Vernon, an engineer with the French Army. They lived in Sfax and later Beja, and Dobie continued to paint, sending pictures to exhibitions abroad, including the Empire Exhibition of 1937. Despite civil unrest in Tunisia, and later the outbreak of the Second World War, they remained in Beja, keeping an open house to Allied servicemen. As fighting raged within miles of her home she slept with a dog beside her and pistol under her pillow for protection.

The occasion of Beatrix’s infrequent return visits to New Zealand were often reported in the press, on one visit in 1935 she commented in the Evening Post on life and art in Tunisia: “Life in a French colony is full of interest but it encourages the housewife in a woman more than an artist. [I] found [I] could not get into “casserole cookery” mood one minute and into painting the next.”

On the subject of art Beatrix said “Tunis was certainly a land of sunlight and a perfect place for painting. French art had experienced the cult for hypermodernism, but it was now coming back to a true form, enriched by the experience of its adventuring. People were realising that pictures without drawing, colour or form were not “liveable” with.”

While not in the first tier of New Zealand’s expatriate artists, Beatrix certainly achieved some success as an artist in her lifetime, and deserved the epitaph a ‘varied career of unusual interest’ bestowed upon her by the Evening Post when reporting her death in Tunisia in 1944.

The HBMT holds another work by Beatrix – an undated, untitled landscape, possibly of a Hawke’s Bay scene. We also have a work painted in 1911 of Hawke’s Bay farmer and industrialist William Nelson which has been on loan to us from the Napier Borough Council since 1940. In 2002 Whangarei Art Museum held an exhibition on Beatrix and her father called Portraits of Place, with loans from HBMT (including North African Coast).

Dobie. B. W.M. Nelson Esq, Waikoko, Tomoana c1911 on loan from Napier Borough Council40/21

If anyone knows the whereabouts of other works by Beatrix Dobie painted in Malta and North Africa, or knows more about her connections with Hawke’s Bay please get in touch.

amongst the stocking fillers

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In early December of 2011, Dick Frizzell gave the Hawke’s Bay Museums Trust an early Christmas present of 92 artist proof prints. Classic works like Mickey to Tiki, the Red Haring Series, Give it a Whirl and many more were amongst the stocking fillers.

My project whilst working back at the glorious HBMAG over my Uni Holiday break is to go over each of the 92 prints, get their dimensions, take a photograph, write a brief description, enter all the relevant information into the collection database, then mat them all. I also got a chance to sit in on a curatorial meeting to see how they go about coming up with exhibition ideas, which was, in my head, more complex than I had originally thought. I was then asked to think about how I would go about exhibiting the newly acquired Frizzell prints. A feeling of con-puzzlement (being confused and puzzled at the same time) swept over me upon being asked this and at the realisation of the daunting task ahead.

My work station

Viewing each of the works more than half a dozen times three distinctive themes became apparent to me in the prints we received from Dick; Tiki’s, Charlie (the Four Square guy) and household things like recipes, appliances and food. Annoyingly for myself I couldn’t escape these themes over the Christmas and New Year break.  Firstly, because everywhere I went had something that reminded me of a particular print, especially since the Four Square Man’s image seemed to pop up in the most unlikely of places. And secondly because I kept coming up with little exhibition ideas that started with “if I were to exhibit these in an exhibition… How would I exhibit them? Where would I exhibit them? What ones out of the 92 prints would I exhibit? And why are we exhibiting them/why these particular works are being exhibited?” More questions than answers would usually eventuate from such ideas.  But such ideas can be thought about whilst carrying on with my matting.

Akaroa, 1999, Dick Frizzell, collection of Hawke's Bay Museums Trust / Ruawharo Ta-u-Rangi 2011/42/37

In my opinion the matting part is definitely the fun part. Thinking about it now though, all matting is, is cutting a rectangular shape out of mat board using a set algebraic equation and a mat cutter, pretty much making me a glorified rectangle cutter. I won’t bore you with the details of the equation, but it involves numbers and the horrible idea of using algebra to get the area and placement of the window of mat you need to cut out. After the mat is cut and the work is centred, the next step is to attach the rice paper hinges to the back of the work. Using another set of rice paper hinges I then attached the work to its backing mat which is joined to the window mat creating a folder with a window cut out of it (multiply this process by 92 and that’s a lot of rectangular cut outs). After all that you get a final matted work which, if need be, is ready to go into a frame and into an exhibition.

Making sure it's centred

When I was first told about my project back in November I wasn’t the biggest fan of Dick’s work, but now, through either being surrounded by Frizzellian prints, or the reading up I’ve been doing, I find myself growing fonder of his work. Am I, dare I say it, becoming a fan? I guess only time will tell.

The finished product

happy new year Leo

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Lately, we’ve been spending rather more time than usual looking over our shoulders – it’s inevitable I suppose that we seek to be reassured by the history of this place as we rush headlong toward the reopening of the Museum next year.

In the weeks before Christmas we chanced across a delightful file of ‘miscellaneous’ papers written by museum directors’ past. During our spare moments we pored over the scraps of paper, reading aloud to each other snippets of this and that – from intriguing anecdotes about the collection, to all sorts of amusing advice about how to run a museum.

It is the voice of Leo Bestall (1895 – 1959), the Museum’s first Director that dominates these files. I immediately felt a very strong impression of him and was possessed by that nagging desire that inflicts a historian from time to time – to meet the man. How I wish I could have talked to him – if it is possible to know a man at all from the leavings on a few pieces of paper I don’t know – but I thought we might have got along rather well and I felt the disappointment that comes from lifetimes that don’t cross.

Working in a museum, a type of public institution that exists in the world mainly because of the passionately obsessive curiosity and drive of particular individuals, long dead men have a way of looming over us. Just as I was feeling over-burdened by the weight of one demanding institutional ancestor – thank you William Colenso – I read these documents and felt Leo shake my brain about even more. 

Bestall’s perspectives on museums in general, and this one in particular were refreshing and energising. He was no passionless academic, he doesn’t get too tangled in questioning whether museums should exist and why, he knew it and he just got on and did it, scrambled over the hurdles and seemed to have a rather good time.

It’s all too easy to feel exhausted by the demands of this new museum we are making, especially now the calendar has ticked around to 2012 and reopening looms just one year away. Bestall’s lessons were good and timely ones for me.

Just before Christmas the whole team visited the museum site to have an explore and share a morning tea with our lovely builders from Gemco. I was particularly keen to get back into the ‘Bestall’ Gallery because the name meant more to me than it had before. Uppermost in my mind as I walked around was the fun and thrill of what we were doing. In particular, I had such pleasure in seeing the restoration of Bestall’s building underway, its galleries are a thing of beauty and I know they will be a pleasure to inhabit in their new form.

It was Leo’s vision, and sheer bloody-mindness that made this building in 1936. In proof that passion bears fruit that outlasts us, I think he would be quite delighted to see the HBMAG’s current team wandering about the bones of his building, as alive to its possibilities almost 80 years on.

So Leo, a 2012 New Year’s toast to you, thanks for those letters you left behind, we are thinking about you, and we think what you made here in Napier in 1936 was pretty darn fantastic.

welcome to the HBMAG blog

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Welcome to the Hawke’s Bay Museum & Art Gallery’s new blog. Here you’ll be able to get an insider view of the work being done in preparation for the reopened HBMAG coming your way in 2013. At different times different staff from throughout the museum and art gallery will be giving you a glimpse of the projects they are working on, the research being undertaken and the discoveries made.

I hope you enjoy this personal behind the scenes tour.

Douglas Lloyd Jenkins