St Ives, summer, 1920. The New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins is busy with a painting school and a ‘crowd of pupils’ is distracting her from her own work.
A seasoned and long-suffering teacher, she has little patience with the ‘duffers’ in her flock — the ‘pampered well fed English woman whose physical welfare is her only thought’. This year, however, she has a new student who stands out for her talent and commitment. ‘I have one very bright N. Zealander, from Wanganui, Collier by name — who is coming on wonderfully — I’ll make something of her I feel sure,’ Hodgkins writes to her mother.
Edith Collier was then 35, a mature single woman who had spent the past eight years studying art in England and Ireland. Under the guidance of dynamic teachers, including the Australian Margaret McPherson (later Margaret Preston), she had abandoned the academic realism she had learnt at art school in Whanganui and developed a bolder, experimental style. At St Ives, galvanised by Frances Hodgkins, she was painting her best work to date. By October 1920, Edith had hatched a new plan — she would travel to the south of France with her teacher and continue to pursue her art there.
But at that point, Edith’s parents intervened. They had supported her for years, funding her art education in the expectation that she would eventually return to Whanganui and establish herself there as an art teacher. They now made it clear: it was time for her to come home. She set about packing her paintings and possessions, which included some 400 books and journals, in crates ordered from a London merchant. When she finally sailed, in 1921, Edith’s cargo included more than 350 artworks — an impressive collection, influenced by British and European modernism, including some of the finest portraits painted by a New Zealander in the twentieth century.
In January 1922 she arrived in Whanganui, returning to the childhood home where her story began.
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Edith Collier grew up in Whanganui with considerable advantages as the daughter of a prominent and successful family. Her father, Henry, born in Manchester, England, in 1852, was the eldest son of a textile manufacturer, John Collier, and his wife, Lydia, who had 10 surviving children, all with musical interests.
Like many ambitious young Englishmen, Henry Collier looked to the colonies for opportunity and adventure. Arriving in New Zealand in 1877, he initially worked as a music teacher in Whanganui, then experiencing a surge in European settlement and development after the suppression of Māori resistance in the late 1860s. In 1878, in partnership with a brother who had followed him to New Zealand, Henry acquired a business importing musical scores and instruments.
H.Collier & Co prospered in the following years, occupying an impressive warehouse at 57 Victoria Avenue in Whanganui and eventually opening branches in New Plymouth and Palmerston North. A canny businessman, Henry also purchased land in the Rangiwaea district in the Rangitīkei, which formed the basis of Wakarua Station, still in the Collier family today.
Henry met his future wife, Eliza Catherine Parkes, a third-generation New Zealander of English descent, when he visited her home as her piano tutor. Music and art were considered suitable pursuits for genteel young women, and Eliza, the daughter of a well-to-do farming family, was also taking private lessons in painting at the time. Henry and Eliza married in 1883 and their first child, Edith Marion Collier, was born in Whanganui on 28 March 1885. Henry’s mother wrote to congratulate him, adding a caveat: ‘How sorry I am it is not a little boy.’
Soon afterwards, Henry made a solo trip to England for further musical training, and his return, more than a year later, evidently came as a shock to his 18-month-old daughter. Edith had grown accustomed to having her mother’s attention and living in a mainly female world. After Henry’s return his family grew rapidly: Edith’s brother John (Jack) was born in 1887, and Henry and Eliza went on to have a total of nine surviving children over a 17-year period.
Henry was absent for much of Edith’s childhood, in 1896 making a second trip to England that was extended to nearly five years. This time, as well as studying music, he helped his brother Arthur in an ultimately unsuccessful venture to develop a two-speed bicycle gear. Eliza, left behind with six young children, was sceptical about the project, and Henry’s absence put pressure on his family, even with the domestic help available at the time. As the eldest, Edith had special responsibilities: she was expected to be ‘a good little nurse’ for her mother, helping with the younger children and household duties, and she developed a keen sense of responsibility to others that would endure all her life.
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Edith and her siblings grew up at ‘Ringley’, the family home on St Johns Hill, a sprawling wooden villa on extensive grounds with a croquet lawn and tennis court. Music was an important part of daily life, and Edith took piano and cello lessons and played chamber music in a family quartet. At school in Whanganui she showed an early ability in drawing and painting, and her parents encouraged her artistic interests. Henry, whose musical life took second place to his career as a businessman, was particularly ambitious for his eldest child.
As a young woman, Edith had opportunities that had not been available to her mother’s generation. Women in New Zealand had gained the vote in 1893, a great advance towards equality in citizenship, and the possibilities of formal education and training for the professions were increasing. In particular, the traditional caring professions, such as nursing and teaching, were considered suitable for young women. But in art, too, there were new opportunities: as Edith Collier’s biographer Joanne Drayton notes, it ‘was one avenue that offered colonial women possibilities for professional credibility and status’.
Edith was fortunate to be in Whanganui, which in 1892 had been the fourth New Zealand city to establish a public art school.16 The Wanganui Technical School of Art and Design (which later merged into the Wanganui Technical College) focused on drawing and design skills, which were essential to many trades. Edith enrolled there in 1903 and was tutored by Minnie Izett, and later by Ivy Copeland and the English migrant Dennis Seaward. Beginning with drawing from plaster casts and gradually progressing to painting in watercolour and oils, her training followed traditional lines, emphasising the importance of careful observation and meticulous drawing.
Under the South Kensington system of art and design, which enabled New Zealanders to gain a British qualification, Edith passed her first examinations in 1909. She completed her course of study in 1911 with first- and second-class passes in subjects such as model drawing, ‘memory drawing of plant form’, freehand drawing and painting still life.
Edith’s early work includes watercolours of plants and birds, oil paintings, and Arts and Crafts designs, which were an important part of the South Kensington curriculum. Her oils are uneven in quality, but the finest, such as Still Life with Glass and Lemons, are unusually assured for student work. A study in colour and tone, beautifully balanced, it has a quiet luminosity. According to Edith’s sister Dorothy, it was Dennis Seaward who suggested that she continue her studies in London, ‘and once the idea was suggested there was no peace’. Edith received further support from a family friend and neighbour, Herbert Babbage, an artist who had recently returned from study in London and Paris. Like Seaward, he recognised her potential.
Among local artists, it was taken for granted that there was no substitute for overseas experience — attending the famous art schools of London and Paris and studying contemporary developments in painting. New Zealand artists had travelled overseas for decades, and women had led the way, beginning with Dorothy Kate Richmond in the 1870s and followed by Grace Joel, Margaret Stoddart and Frances Hodgkins. The challenge for these women, brought up with highly traditional ideas of femininity and duty, was to develop the level of ambition and determination that life as a professional artist demanded. Most eventually returned home, some continuing to contribute to New Zealand’s artistic life, while others abandoned their work due to the pressures of marriage, motherhood and family commitments.
Only Frances Hodgkins managed to establish a reputation in England, but her success, after decades of struggle, came at great personal cost. ‘Art . . . absorbs your whole life & being,’ she declared in 1924. ‘Few women can do it successfully. It requires enormous vitality. That is my conception of genius — vitality . . . One’s family, overseas — awaits results — not knowing or realising the fierce obstacles & difficulties. How can they?’
But for Edith Collier in 1912, the future seemed promising. Her family was proud of her talent and ambitious for her. Perhaps one day, her brother Frank suggested, she would ‘paint some famous pictures which will be a credit to the Collier family’. There was a precedent, in Henry’s example, in travelling overseas for further study, and an English teaching qualification would provide her with an extra layer of security in the years ahead. As Edith’s aunt Annie commented in a letter, ‘It is a grand thing to be independent & I think it right for girls as well as boys to earn their own living, one never knows what may turn up. You might be left a widow with a family to provide for (of course you will be getting married) & then you could take to your old work again.’
In reality, Edith showed no interest in marriage, then or later. She was droll about the hints of family friends and relatives and their perennial question: ‘Are you engaged, Edith?’ Perhaps the example of her father, absent for so much of her childhood, and the trials of her mother’s life had dispelled any romantic illusions. Her letters reveal a scepticism about marriage as a prospect for her friends, and her wariness about men was often remarked on — as her niece Patricia Lonsdale recalled, ‘Outside of her brothers, men made Edith nervous.’
All her life, Edith’s friendships were with women, and women teachers were particularly influential in her artistic development. There is no hint of any romantic involvement in her letters, however; and as far as we know of this very private woman, she never established a long-term intimate relationship with anyone, male or female.
Before departing New Zealand on SS Turakina in February 1913, Edith was photographed for the Collier family album. About to leave the world she has known all her life, she is elegant in a formal portrait, a picture of Edwardian femininity in a high-necked white dress and fashionable hat. In an informal image, taken in the garden at Ringley, she carries a basket of lilies and gazes calmly at the camera. At 27 she is handsome rather than conventionally pretty, a mature woman with a quiet presence and strength of character.
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After arriving in London in March 1913, Edith enrolled at St John’s Wood School of Art, one of several institutions that attracted aspiring artists from all over the world. She was soon immersed in her new life — studying, visiting galleries and museums, and attending lectures and concerts. ‘I am just in full swing now,’ she wrote to her brother Reg. ‘[N]ever had such a time in my life, working all the time funny old stick aren’t I.’ Edith’s letters contain many allusions to her sense of being different to other young women. ‘A peculiarity I am & always will be,’ she wrote to her parents in 1916. On another occasion, she warned them, ‘I hope you people are not expecting a fashionable entertaining daughter.’
Edith had arranged to stay at Queen Alexandra’s House, a purposebuilt hostel for female students in Kensington Grove. There she met other ‘peculiarities’ like herself — young, single women, passionate about their studies and determined to take advantage of the opportunities London offered. Her new women friends included the South African art student Charlie Ayliff, who accompanied her on sketching expeditions in London and further afield. Edith painted naturalistic street scenes, landscapes and church interiors during this period, and images such as St Bartholomew continued her interest in using subtle tonal effects to create form. Two years later she dismissed some of her early London work: ‘I burnt a lot of the daubs I did the first year no good’.
When she visited Manchester to meet her father’s family, Edith found an ally in her cousin Frances (Fannie) Collier, a student of economics at the University of Manchester who would later become its first female lecturer. Both women were talented, single-minded spinsters, at odds with the conventions of femininity and social life, and they formed an immediate and enduring bond. Fannie and her friends were involved in the women’s suffrage movement, then gaining notoriety through a major civil disobedience campaign, and Edith attended meetings with her cousin. A sash with the legend ‘Votes for Women’ is among her personal possessions held at the Sarjeant Gallery. In 1914 Edith had an alarming experience when she visited the National Gallery with her cousin: Fannie was mistaken for the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst and whisked off in a police van.
Edith had arrived in Britain at a time of escalating political strife, with the suffrage movement, labour disputes and the Irish National struggle all causing civil unrest. Some of those tensions are pictured in the charcoal drawing Labour Trouble: the students’ raid at Albert Hall during Larkin’s speech. Police and protesters confront each other with batons and sticks, and the tall, gloomy buildings looming over the scene contribute to the atmosphere of menace. This work was evidently inspired by the Dublin Lockout, led by James Larkin, which began in August 1913 and had great repercussions in Britain as the solidarity movement for the Irish workers gained ground.
Labour Trouble shows the traditional skills Edith was developing at art school. As the prospectus noted, the St John’s Wood student ‘becomes acquainted with the principles of draughtsmanship; attains patience, an accurate perception of values, and a knowledge of the human figure founded on the conceptions of the great masters’. She found the Life Room, where she drew the nude figure for the first time, the most useful — and initially rather intimidating. She admitted to her parents that she was ‘very shaky’ in her first
class, but she soon overcame her nervousness and applied herself diligently to her studies, as works such as Standing Female Nude (see page 73) attest. She also bought anatomy books to improve her understanding of human form.
In December 1913, Edith informed her mother that she had passed her first practical teaching examinations: ‘I got excellent for 4 subjects & very good for rest so that is good.’ In the same month, she exhibited seven works at the St John’s Wood sketch club — mainly landscapes, including tree studies andviews of Kew Gardens — but by now she was disillusioned with the quality of the teaching. As she later explained to her parents, ‘Those great men who used to come and give a crit at St John’s didn’t criticise you[r] own work but the school as a whole, and they didn’t stay longer than could be helped.’ In fact, some of the ‘great men’ who were listed as teachers on the syllabus only ‘looked in once a year’.
Edith was also becoming aware of the conservatism of St John’s Wood in fostering a traditional approach to art. She had arrived in London just months too late to visit the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, organised by the artist and critic Roger Fry, which had closed at the Grafton Galleries in December 1912. Like its 1910 predecessor, Manet and the Post-Impressionists — at which, according to Virginia Woolf, the audience was ‘thrown into paroxysms of rage and laughter’ — the exhibition caused a commotion in the British art world. It featured work by Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso and others — artists who had abandoned academic naturalism in favour of radical invention and self-expression. The exhibition made the news even in Whanganui, where it was reported in a sarky and dismissive syndicated newspaper column.
Edith’s first contact with modernism was via the Australian painter Margaret McPherson, who was teaching private pupils in London. The artist and novelist Stella Bowen, who met McPherson in 1911, described her as ‘a redheaded little firebrand of a woman who was not only an excellent painter, fresh from Paris, but a most inspiring teacher’. On her first visit to Europe as a young woman, in 1903, McPherson had been overwhelmed by the avant-garde art she encountered in Munich and Paris: as she recalled, ‘. . . our poor little artist was obliged to become a very humble student indeed. She found that she had been hopping about on one rung only of the ladder of art.’
In the following years, McPherson assimilated the lessons of postimpressionism, finding inspiration in the vigorous, vibrant paintings of Paul Gauguin; the work of the Scottish colourists, including John Duncan Fergusson; and the flatness and linear rhythms of Japanese ukiyo-e prints. In The Teapot Cosy, she imposes a rhythmic, decorative design on a collection of domestic objects, arrayed on a flattened, tilted-up tabletop. Gleaming apples and dishes pirouette around a teapot, which dominates the image in a striking black-and-white cover. Edith Collier acquired the painting and it became one of her prized possessions, serving as a lesson in pictorial design, compositional balance and colour harmony.
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In 1914, Edith followed McPherson and her companion, the artist Gladys Reynell, to Ireland, where McPherson had established a summer art school in the small fishing village of Bonmahon (also known as Bunmahon). Located in County Waterford, Bonmahon had once been an important centre for copper and lead mining, but the industry had declined since the mid-1860s, leaving its residents living in poverty. ‘Expect simplicity,’ McPherson warned her pupil. Staying with a local family, Edith was captivated by the warmth of the villagers and the stark beauty of the coastal landscape — ‘a grand place for painting’ — with its dilapidated cottages, steep cliffs and rocky shoreline.
Back in London, Edith took private lessons from McPherson over the winter, learning how to simplify her work and prioritise pictorial structure and colour relationships. She told her family, ‘I have learnt more from Miss Mac than St Johns.’ Always highly self-critical, however, Edith was prone to doubt her abilities. ‘I am wondering if you will be satisfied,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘& father not think well is she worth all the money I have spent & so on’. In the same letter, she mentioned her sister Helen Bethea, who was taking art classes in Whanganui: ‘She is much cleverer than me & not so gloomy as me. I waste half my time in thinking I can’t do things.’
Early in April 1915, Edith returned to Bonmahon to attend McPherson’s classes, telling her parents, ‘All the old souls came up & shook your hand & said welcome back to old Ireland.’ She felt an affinity with the elderly residents, admiring their stoicism and resilience, and some became her paid models. Peasant Woman of Bonmahon makes an interesting comparison with Reynell’s Old Irish Couple, also painted in the village. Edith’s portrait is more dynamic in treatment: she positions her subject off-centre, dominating the picture; a stoic and monumental presence, her dark skirt anchoring her to the floor. Her expressive hands, neatly folded, draw the eye — their diagonal movement echoed in the forms of the chickens at her side.
In May, Edith wrote home, ‘I am painting a lovely old man just now, 92 is his age tomorrow he is going out to sea fishing.’ An Irish Fisherman (An Old Salt) shows her empathy for her subject — a sensitive character study, dignifying his craggy, weathered face and substantial figure. The subtle tonality is typical of her early work, and only the flourish of striped fabric hints at the more inventive post-impressionist style she was developing under McPherson’s tuition.
By contrast, Little Schoolboy of Bonmahon, painted in the same period, is a bold and strikingly decorative portrait. Edith uses colour with aplomb, echoing the rosy tones of the child’s face in the sumptuous floral wallpaper. She flattens the picture plane, merging the boundary between foreground and background and unsettling our sense of spatial relationships — is the green framing device on the left, for example, part of the patterned wallpaper? The opulent colour and fluent brushwork suggest a growing confidence in her work, and a new enjoyment of the sensuous qualities of oil paint.
In August, Margaret McPherson wrote to Edith’s mother about her progress. ‘Miss Collier is working very hard. She will do good things and is sending to a London professional show early next year. I think you will be astonished at the quality of her work . . . I do not want to eulogise her because I am her teacher, but I assure you, she has quite an excellent talent for portraiture & ought to do very well in New Zealand.’ In the same letter, McPherson thanked Eliza for the clothes she had sent, at Edith’s suggestion, for Bonmahon residents: ‘I cannot tell you how much they are appreciated. It is almost inconceivable the poverty here.’
Edith also painted the Bonmahon landscape, exploring the quality of the light in works such as A Grey Day on the Irish Coast (see page 85). In Rocks of Bonmahon, Ireland (see page 87), she adopts a high viewpoint to dramatise the scene, adding broad brushstrokes of green, blue and lilac to enliven the rockface and water. She also learnt to make monotypes, producing swift summary images such as Knockmahon Village (see page 84). Edith was in her element in these months, surrounded by willing models and majestic landscape, and buoyed by the company of McPherson and other female students. Later she recalled, ‘[I] never enjoyed myself anywhere like Ireland.’ But at the same time, she felt a sense of guilt at her privilege: ‘It seems selfish to be painting & all that with this war & thousands dying, but it may be of some use later on.’
