Untitled [firescreen]

This painted firescreen, made by the amateur artist, May Buick in 1900, presents an idyllic scene. A woman, dressed in riding habit leads a horse through a carefully manicured garden. In the background is a turreted building, the curve of a sandy bay in the far distance. The cultivated view is framed by lush, tangled foliage, ripe with fruit and flowers, and inhabited by nesting birds.

May Buick was born in 1882 in Papakaio, just north of Oamaru in North Otago where she was an active member of the local community, acting on many committees including treasurer for the Red Cross, and possibly working as a teacher. Buick does not seem to have been part of any formal art group, but her artistic talents were recognised locally. For example, in 1904, a ‘painting of a rural scene’ by Buick was gifted in farewell to a local resident, newspapers noting it was ‘from the capable brush of Miss May Buick’.  Buick’s work is typical of her time. Painting flowers, plants and birds was considered a suitable undertaking for middle-class women, providing them with a respectable pastime. While women were avid participants in an emerging art scene, their work often extended beyond paintings on walls, to the adornment of all manner of domestic surfaces, from table tops to screens, fans and mantelpiece drapes, even drain pipes! In exhibition contexts, both locally and abroad, these decorative exhibits were often shown as examples of ‘ladies work’ rather than works of art, and were often catalogued as ‘miscellaneous’.

The scene that Buick has painted on the firescreen appears to be a blending of the local and the exotic. The gothic building seems to be based on St Josephs Cathedral in Dunedin, with a sandy southern bay in the distance. The foliage and birds are very definitely exotic, not indigenous. The birds on the right may be nightingales, but the yellow birds are unidentifiable to Te Papa’s Curator Ornithology, Colin Miskelly, who thought they could be ‘fanciful renditions of golden oriole’.  The plants have been identified by Te Papa Curator Botany Heidi Meudt as wild cherry on the left, and elderflower on the right, species that were introduced by early settlers – elderflower was naturalised in 1867 and cherry in 1872 – and which remain widespread in the Otago countryside.

There are then, two strong narratives associated with the painting – the role of female artists in late colonial New Zealand, as well as a sense of cultural dislocation. The donor of this firescreen found herself questioning ‘I wonder where the painter thought she was? Was she trying to hang on to England? Or was she trying to create a conventionally pretty scene, but slightly struggling to relate to the raw materials around her?’

Rebecca Rice, Curator Historical Art, 2023