Overview
In a clearing in the bush, a home has been built from roughly hewn boards. A climbing rose meanders up one wall of the partly fenced ‘house’. Chickens scratch near a cow at rest and a dog by its makeshift kennel. The stumps in the foreground, and the burnt remains of trees behind, show the effort that has been required to transform the landscape.
Paintings depicting scenes like the one in Samuel Stuart’s A bush settler’s home in New Zealand (1884) were reasonably common in the mid 1800s. Usually, they were made by artistically inclined pioneers (see, for example, the Messenger sisters’ Landscape with settlers). But Stuart lived in Kingsland, Auckland, which by 1884 was connected to the ‘city’ by public transport. His painting may have been inspired by observations of pioneering life, but it was definitely not the result of his own life experience.
Towards a New Zealand art
For another artist, it may not have mattered whether a painting originated from direct experience or not. But Stuart was secretary of the New Zealand Art Students’ Association, which had its own requirements. (He later became the secretary of the Auckland Society of Arts, a position he held almost until the end of his life.)
Formed in December 1883, the association promoted the development of New Zealand art as a ‘special study’. Its members criticised those who had ‘treated our scenery according to their ideas of nature in the mother countries’, proving incapable of ‘adapting themselves … to the new’.
The association proposed that close study of New Zealand’s natural scenery, as well as of Māori taonga (treasures), would lend itself to the development of an art ‘characteristic of our colony’.
A winning work
For its first annual exhibition, in 1884, the association stipulated that:
… exhibitors will not send in paintings exhibited in a tone foreign, or borrowed from any source than the artist’s own experience of nature in the colony … for, upon the sincerity of its art, the success of this institution as a national association of artists will depend.
Artists were asked to exhibit under pseudonyms so that they would be judged fairly. Stuart entered A bush settler’s home in New Zealand in the category for ‘best landscape (oil or watercolour)’, under the pseudonym ‘Puriri’. It was awarded first prize.
Breaking the mould
Stuart occupies a curious place in New Zealand’s art history. He specialised in detailed oil paintings that recreated colonial photographs, prints, and drawings and were characterised by a slightly amateur style.
A bush settler’s home in New Zealand does not fit this mould. Like The interior of a Maori pa in the olden time, produced in 1885 for the association’s second exhibition, it is a meticulously executed original painting without obvious precedent.
Critical responses to Stuart’s work
The New Zealand Herald, in its review of the 1884 exhibition, noted that Stuart’s painting provided evidence ‘both of ability and of patient work’. But these qualities were not always seen as positive. In 1883, another New Zealand Herald reviewer had written that
Mr S Stuart … is open to the reproach of painting too much and too wide. The advice of Mr Ruskin and Sir Joshua Reynolds is applicable to young artists: (1) ‘Beware of crowding your canvas’, (2) ‘Paint little pictures before attempting big ones’.
Stuart obviously ignored this advice: A bush settler’s home in New Zealand is a relatively large picture. The painting charms its audience through an apparently realistic, if somewhat naive, representation of a colonial scene.
References
New Zealand Art Students’ Association, New Zealand Art Students' Association of Auckland: Constitution and rules, exhibition regulations, and lists of prizes, for the year 1884, Wilsons & Horton, Auckland, 1884.