View of Dunedin, Otago, N.Z.

In 1914 the book dealer Albert Berthel approached the New Zealand high commissioner in London to inquire whether the Dominion Museum was interested in views of New Zealand towns, at £4 each. James McDonald, the acting director, replied that ‘apart from any artistic method the drawings may possess they may be of some historical interest and worth securing for the National Collection’.1 The works were purchased for £20 and by May 1916 they were framed and hung in the museum. However, within months the ‘authenticity’ of the drawings was questioned as it was suspected they were ‘not original sketches but copies made from old woodcuts or photographs’.2

This was indeed the case. Walter Scarlett Hatton’s View of Dunedin, Otago, N.Z. is a five-part panorama in watercolours, dated 1867. It is based on a wood engraving published in the Illustrated London News in 1867, which in turn was derived from an 1863 panoramic photograph by William Meluish. There are at least three versions of this panorama in New Zealand collections, all of which vary in detail and colouring (noting that neither photography nor newspaper engravings allowed for colour reproduction at this time). This panorama is the most detailed, as one can make out the names of several buildings, such as the Criterion Hotel and the Theatre Royal.

Hatton’s watercolour has all the charm of a colonial amateur painting. But Hatton was not of colonial origins: he never set foot in New Zealand or in any of the other countries he depicted, but was born in England and at the time of the 1911 census listed himself as an artist resident in Wimbledon, not far from Mr Berthel. Although McDonald never knew Hatton’s identity, he was affronted by the apparent deception, dismissing the paintings as ‘fakes’ and suggesting they should have been destroyed. However, Hatton’s works, accepted for what they are (early twentieth-century copies of newspaper engravings), offer a record of the developing colonial cityscapes in imagined colour, as opposed to the usual monochrome photographs.

Rebecca Rice

1 James McDonald to James Hislop, under-secretary of Internal Affairs, 9 April 1914, MU2, part 2, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa archives (author’s emphasis).

2 James Allan Thomson to Thomas Mackenzie, 9 June 1916, MU2, part 2, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa archives.