Enchantress

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Francis Shurrock was one of several English artists who came to New Zealand in the years after the First World War, part of the La Trobe scheme instigated by the Department of Education to improve the quality of technical education in the Dominion. A graduate of London’s Royal College of Art, Shurrock accepted the position of modelling and craft master at the Canterbury College School of Art. Arriving in Christchurch in 1924, he found an institution in which sculpture had only the most tenuous position, a fact reflected in the expectation that half his teaching hours would be set aside for the instruction of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. Despite this, Shurrock established himself as a fixture in the local art scene as both artist and critic. Perhaps more importantly, as a teacher at the college for twenty-five years he helped prepare the path for the emergence of a local sculptural tradition.

Tilli Frankel, the model for Enchantress, was also an émigré. She moved to Christchurch from Vienna with her first husband, the plant geneticist Otto Frankel, in 1929. The couple (who separated in 1937) provided conservative Christchurch with some much-needed cosmopolitanism — ‘[t]hey drank “real” coffee, dressed their salads with olive oil, cooked with wine or garlic and ate salami’1 — and Tilli presided over European-style salons for local artists, writers and musicians. As well as Shurrock, she sat for portraits by Rita Angus, Evelyn Page, Russell Clark and Robert N Field, all of whom celebrated her lively personality, self-possessed manner and strong features.

As Shurrock’s biographer Mark Stocker has observed, Enchantress reflects ‘a simplified semi-modernism’.2 Although Shurrock did work with direct carving — the preferred technique of his more modern English contemporaries like Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth — Enchantress was modelled in clay and cast in bronze. Shurrock offsets the dark patina of the bronze with a slight surface patterning, a residue of the tools he used to work the clay, and this lends the work a decorative quality that complements its strength and solidity.

William McAloon

1 Janet Paul and Neil Roberts, Evelyn Page — Seven decades, exhibition catalogue, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, and Allen & Unwin, Wellington, 1986, p. 24.

2 Mark Stocker, Francis Shurrock: Shaping New Zealand sculpture, Otago University Press, Dunedin, 2000, p. 61.