New Zealand Lilies

Emily Cummings Harris (1837-1925) was one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant botanical artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She emigrated from England to New Zealand with her family in 1840, who were based in Taranaki until they evacuated to Hobart due to the New Zealand Wars. There, Emily studied art, and on their return to New Zealand she ran a small primary school in Nelson with her sisters, Frances and Ellen. Harris was also a private tutor, which often competed with her time as an artist and writer.

Harris was an incredibly active artist, poet, teacher and exhibitor. She sent her works to exhibitions around New Zealand and further abroad – including the Sydney International Exhibition 1879, Melbourne 1880 – and won several awards, including first prize at the New Zealand Industrial Exhibition in Wellington in 1885. Working mostly in watercolour, Harris focused on botanical illustrations of New Zealand flowers and plants, but also produced artworks of birds, still lifes and landscapes. In 1890 she published a suite of three illustrated books titled New Zealand Berries, New Zealand Flowers and New Zealand Ferns. These were produced using lithography, with the assistance of a local bookseller, HD Jackson, and Harris later hand-coloured the plates for purchasers.

Harris typically worked in watercolour, but in the early twentieth century she began painting in oils. (1)  In 1906 she was commissioned to produce 12 large-scale paintings by the Commissioner of the West Coast Court for the New Zealand International Exhibition, due to open in Christchurch in November the same year. This painting is very likely to be one of this series, one of three large panels picturing West Coast Flora. (2)  It pictures a bouquet of indigenous lilies, including: flax, probably haraheke, Phormium tenax, tūrutu, blueberry, Dianella (blue fruit at top); possibly rengarenga, Arthropodium (white spray underneath the blue); cabbage tree, titoki, Cordyline australis or Cordyline banksia (white spray in the middle); a wharawhara/tākahakaha, likely Astelia hastata (white spray at bottom); possibly kareao, supplejack, Ripogonum scandens (red berries at bottom-left); possibly Riki, Bulbinella (yellow-brown spray at middle right). (3)  Unfortunately, information or evidence about how this painting was displayed as part of the suite has not been recovered, but there is no doubt that this represents one of the most significant commissions of botanical painting from a woman artist in the early 20th century.

1) A newspaper reporter notes in 1904 that Harris exhibited three unframed oil paintings of New Zealand flowers at an exhibition at Nelson Art Gallery, Colonist, 6 June 1904, p. 1
2) See Catherine Field Dodgson and Michelle Leggott, Groundwork: The art and writing of Emily Cumming Harris, Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2025, pp.
3) As identified by Te Papa Curator Botany, Leon Perrie, 30 January 2025.