Yellow blossom and rosemary

Margaret Stoddart (1865- 1934) was New Zealand’s leading flower painter of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She trained at Canterbury School of Art, where, in the 1880s, students spent Friday mornings studying botanical art, reflecting the relevance of this study both to design, and to the prevalent interest in picturing and recording the natural world. This painting is a confident watercolour, bearing witness to James Shelley and Sydney Thompson’s description of Stoddart in her obituary, where they noted that although she excelled at flower painting, there was ‘a sterner reality about the painting than the fragile flowers themselves possessed’. There was, they concluded, ‘nothing fragile about Miss Stoddart, but rather a sort of tender violence’. (1)

This painting demonstrates Stoddart’s command of her medium, as well as her talent for painting flowers. She presents the vibrant golden blooms in a lush, asymmetrical composition, tumbling out of the vase and dropping buds. Along with her exposure to botanical painting at art school, Stoddart’s love of the natural environment was nurtured through her family’s social circles. Her father was close friends with Thomas Henry Potts, a keen naturalist and conservationist and Julius von Haast, first Director of the Canterbury Museum. Together these three men founded the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society. Potts was also an early advocate for the protection of native forests.

In light of these associations the subject of this painting is interesting. It was given the title Yellow blossom and rosemary at auction, but Te Papa’s botanists have identified the plant as gorse. This is not only a very unusual subject for an artist in 1890s New Zealand but a plant with a very controversial status in New Zealand’s history. Gorse was introduced as a natural fencing material, but Potts was one of several writers who recognised that it was only valuable when properly managed. It is possible that by the 1890s Stoddart was aware of the ambivalence towards gorse. By painting it in the manner of a cut bloom, carefully arranged in a vase, she may be acknowledging the complex status of this plant, ironically elevating it to the same status as a rose, or a lily. Even today, there are those who consider gorse a noxious weed, and others who see it providing a nursery for the regeneration of native forest.

Rebecca Rice, July 2020

1. James Shelly and Sydney Thompson, quoted in Julie King, Flowers into landscape: Margaret Stoddart 1865-1934, Christchurch: Robert McDougall Art Gallery, 1998, p. 17.