Berry at Pelorus Sound

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

Anyone seeing Christopher Perkins’ iconic regionalist landscape Taranaki, 1931 (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki), might reasonably conclude that he came, he saw and he conquered the New Zealand art world. The reality was more complex and less triumphant. Although Perkins arrived here dreaming of ‘exchanging tired Europe for a temperate Tahiti, exotic with rich flora and a vigorous native art’, he found Wellington Technical College, where he taught, and the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, where he exhibited, stiflingly conformist and parochial: ‘a strip of Victorian England’.1

The coincidence of his five-year stint (1929–34) with economic depression exacerbated matters. Yet he produced his most exciting work here and was certainly not the first artist to have been overawed by Aotearoa’s ‘marvellous light’. Temperamentally restless, he returned to his native England, experiencing a career of relative obscurity before his rediscovery in New Zealand’s story of art by Hamish Keith, which he only just lived to appreciate.

Perkins’ Self-portrait, produced during his New Zealand years, announces a considerable personality and presence. He is confident to the point of arrogance, dynamic and charismatic, qualities conveyed in the unruly hair, decisive brow and craggy nose. Warmly generous to his smart students, Perkins could be withering and cruel to the stragglers. Drawing and design, inculcated into him at London’s Slade School of Art, were of central importance: ‘The instinct for design is the beginning of art and the common denominator of all arts.’² Both the works reproduced here show as much.

Berry at Pelorus Sound is an unfinished portrait of Perkins’s wife, Berry, the daughter of a musician and a fellow free spirit. Dating from a family holiday in summer 1932, its circumstances are vividly recalled by Berry and Christopher’s daughter, Jane Garrett: ‘he sat Mamma on a rock in her old blue dressing gown and painted her with a background of sea and sky, rather in the manner of an early Picasso. She sits four-square on her rock with her chin on one hand, gazing abstractedly into the distance: officially the portrait is called “Berry at Pelorus” but it was usually known in the family as “Washing up? What’s that?”’3

1 Jane Garrett, An artist’s daughter: With Christopher Perkins in New Zealand 1929–34, Shoal Bay Press, Auckland, 1986, p. 27

2 Christopher Perkins, ‘The NZ Academy of Fine Arts Wellington Forty-first Annual Exhibition’, Art in New Zealand, vol.11, no.6, December 1929, p. 132.

3 Jane Garrett, An artist’s daughter: With Christopher Perkins in New Zealand 1929–34, Shoal Bay Press, Auckland, 1986.

Mark Stocker