Lake Manapouri

William George Baker (1864-1929) was an itinerant artist, who travelled extensively around the country painting and selling his works as he went. Baker mostly produced landscapes, and worked in both oil and watercolour. Many of his works picture scenes that were popular with artists and art audiences, including the Pink and White Terraces and the southern lakes and fiords.

In 1889 Baker married Ellen King, the daughter of a prominent Greytown landowner, and the couple moved into their first home in Greytown in the Wairarapa. Together, they travelled around New Zealand, scoping scenes that would become the subjects of Baker’s oil paintings. They moved back to Wellington in 1893, and to Tītahi Bay in 1919, where Baker remained for the rest of his life. Many of his works detail landscapes close to his homes in Tītahi Bay and the Wairarapa.

Although he never received any formal art training, Baker first exhibited with the Fine Arts Association when he was only 19. The Association became the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in 1889, and Baker was a member from 1892-1909. Baker exhibited throughout New Zealand as well as at international exhibitions, including the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Missouri in 1904.

Although he was associated with the world of fine art, Baker remained a firmly commercial artist, painting prolifically, and showing and selling his works wherever possible - at exhibitions, local auctions, agricultural fairs - even the hotels he stayed at during his travels. His work received mixed critical reception, revealing how distanced his work was from the world of academic art.  For example, an 1897 critic for the Evening Post wrote rather scathingly of his painting, “the trail of the common-place is over most of the pictures of W.G. Baker”, saying of even his more highly regarded work that it “is too familiar in design”.

On the other hand, Baker had an extremely wide reach and commercial appeal amongst a more general audience. He sold countless works, often selling entire exhibitions of 100s of works at a time. There are also several newspaper reviews that are more complimentary, claiming that Baker had the “rare instinct that proclaims a poetic imagination”. It is possible, however, that many of these were written by Baker’s agent, John Schapiro, and are less a reflection of Baker’s reputation, and instead function more as canny advertisement. These tensions between trying to make a living as an artist and broader artistic ambitions inform his work.

Lake Manapouri is typical of Baker’s painting and is one of several works picturing the same subject. His works often have a standardised composition, imposing English stylistic conventions on to the landscape, such as the cluster of trees in the foreground that draw you in to the scene, the atmospheric perspective and the hazy glow of sunset. As Bob Maysmor states, he was an artist “not preoccupied with accurately recording the landscape form”. In this painting we can see some of the ways Baker has inserted elements that enhance the picturesque appeal of the composition, for example the set of low flying birds and disproportionately sized sailing boat which are frequent motifs in his work.

While Baker’s representation of topography is broadly accurate, the addition of such motifs and the idealised haze pushes his compositions into the realm of romanticised landscapes, landscapes that had widespread commercial appeal. A quote from 1915 makes sense of Baker’s artistic angle, describing his subjects as “scenic treasures rendered historically permanent by the brush of a master”. Consequently, it is Baker’s status as both an artist of merit, and one working to preserve the colonial narrative of an idyllic landscape that was fast disappearing that forms Baker’s legacy.

This work is included in the exhibition Hiahia Whenua: Landscape and Desire, running from 2022-2024.

References
‘Art Collection,’ Timaru Herald, 23 November 1912, pg. 6.
‘The Arts Society’s Exhibition. Second Notice. The Oils,’ Evening Post, 11 September 1897, pg. 6.
Maysmor, Bob. The Itinerant Artist: Revisiting the Paintings of William George Baker. Porirua: Pataka Museum, 2007.
‘The Work of a Lifetime,’ Wairarapa Age, 9 November 1915, pg. 5.

Rona Chapman, VUW intern, 2022