Māori girl with dog

When Kate Sperrey died in 1893, aged only 31, it was lamented that ‘death has deprived New Zealand…of one of its most promising and artistic daughters’.(1) Sperrey was born in Australia but raised in Dunedin, where she studied art under David Con Hutton at Otago Girls High School. She began exhibiting with the Otago Arts Society in 1879, and the following year was judged to be ‘one of the best amateur artists of the city.(2) In 1881 her strength in portraiture was noted, and by 1883 she was studying abroad, initially in Rome under Giuseppe Ferrari, an early modern portrait painter, then in Paris and London. (3)

Sperrey returned to New Zealand in 1885, settling in Wellington with her father, where she established a studio and quickly established a reputation as a highly competent artist, her works reportedly showing the result of ‘natural ability, good teaching and honest hard work’.(4) She secured many official portrait commissions, including Sir William Fitzherbert, James Macandrew and Sir George Grey.(5) From 1885 until her untimely death in 1893, Sperrey was a regular and highly-praised exhibitor at both local and international exhibitions, showing works at the metropolitan centres in New Zealand, as well as Sydney, Melbourne, London and Paris. Her paintings of Māori subjects from Hawkes Bay earned her a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1889.(6)

Sperrey’s time in Europe had increased her awareness of the potential of picturesque subjects – her painting of an Italian goatherd, now in Te Papa (Italian goatherd | Collections Online - Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa) was one her most acclaimed paintings, earning her gold medals at Melbourne and Dunedin international exhibitions when it was shown in 1889 and 1890 respectively. From 1886 she began turning to Māori subjects, especially children, in her paintings, drawing on studies made from life in communities in the central North Island, King Country and the Hawkes Bay. These visits may have been facilitated through Gilbert Mair, whom she apparently met in 1886 when she was commissioned to paint his portrait to commemorate his being awarded the New Zealand medal.(7) They married in 1888, and had two children, only one – Kate Airini Vane – survived to adulthood, and followed in Sperrey’s footsteps as an artist.

This painting of an unnamed Māori girl pictures her in a bust-length portrait, her dark hair falling over her shoulders and wearing a fine kaitaki with red and green woollen trimmings. A dog, possibly a collie or German shepherd breed, lifts its head towards her adoringly. In contrast to her contemporaries Gottfried Lindauer and Joseph Gaut, who also specialised in portraits of Māori, Sperrey imbues her subjects with a degree of informality, including props or contextual elements that hint at the everyday. Occasionally her painting veered towards sentimentality, her subjects represented as unnaturally doe-eyed, but in this work sentiment is held in check.

As Jane Vial notes in her biography of Sperrey, the fact that she has largely been forgotten speaks as much to the selective nature of art history than it does to her impact and importance as an artist. As a women artist who held a significant reputation for a brief decade her work is deserving of better representation and consideration in our collections. Sperrey is represented by only a handful or works in collections around New Zealand, and Te Papa holds only two paintings, the Italian goatherd, 1884 (1912-0029-1), and Sir William Fitzherbert, 1885 (1992-0035-797) – the latter in very poor condition. It is unusual to find works by female artists practicing in the field of Māori portraiture in the 1880s, which has been dominated by male artists, such as C. F. Goldie, and Gottfried Lindauer. Works by Sperrey rarely come on to the market. The opportunity to acquire two works that represent the strength of Sperrey’s portraiture will both broaden our understanding and appreciation of the field of portraiture and will also go some way to better representing Sperrey and her contributions to art in Aotearoa New Zealand in the late 19th century.

1. ‘The late Mrs Gilbert Mair (Kate Sperrey), New Zealand Times, 25 April 1893, p. 2
2. ‘The Otago Art Society’s exhibition’, Otago Daily Times, 20 December 1879, p. 3; Otago Witness, 26 June 1880, p. 22.
3. Sperrey sent works back for exhibition from Rome for the 1883 Otago Art Society exhibition, see ‘Otago Art Society’, Otago Daily Times, 5 November 1883, p. 3.
4.  ‘Industrial exhibition’, New Zealand Times, 15 August 1885, p. 2
5. ‘Exhibition visitors’, Evening Post, 3 June 1885, p. 2.
6. ‘Paris awards to New Zealanders’, Auckland Star, 9 December 1889, p. 3.
7. Jane Vial, ‘Sperrey, Eleanor Catherine’, from the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 30-Oct-2012. http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/2s36/sperrey-eleanor-catherine
8. See C. Wilkonson, Portraits and places: the work of E. K. Sperrey and K. Airini Vane, Warkworth: C. E. Wilkinson, 1996.