Groundwork: The Art and Writing of Emily Cumming Harris
by Michele Leggott and Catherine Field-Dodgson

She is young, in her early 20s. Restless, impatient, even in mourning. As she writes to her mother in 1860, ‘I am like the active verb, to be and to do.’

She is and she does. The oldest of five daughters, an artist, poet and teacher, Emily Cumming Harris is resourceful, resilient and irrepressible. Throughout this beautifully designed and illustrated book, we see her horse trekking to Taranaki Mounga, camping on Nelson’s Dun Mountain line, sketching in Fiordland, organising family exhibitions, packing up cases of paintings for art shows in Christchurch, Nelson, Sydney, Melbourne and London.

In the opening pages of Groundwork, Harris is writing to the keeper of botany at the British Museum to track down a folio of paintings of mountain flora she had sent to an English relative. She is not a botanist, she explains, but, ‘As a child I lived in the bush for some years & so became familiar with the forest trees & flowers & the manner of growth, & have also camped out many times’.

Her confidence is justified. In watercolour, ink and oil, her paintings of the indigenous flora of Aotearoa New Zealand and the subantarctic islands are hauntingly beautiful, close examinations of colour, form, light, shadow, the graceful stem of a Poroporo flower, the elegant curl of a fern frond, the startlingly luminescent leaves of Ligusticum latifolium. Several of these were included in her books on New Zealand flowers, berries and ferns, praised for their botanical accuracy as much as their aesthetic impact. Others were used to illustrate scientific treatises, bringing artistic interpretation, the authors write, ‘to bear on scientific observation’.

Emily Cumming Harris, Solanum aviculare (Poroporo), hand-coloured lithograph, 306 x 245mm, plate 12 in New Zealand Flowers, Nelson, HD Jackson, 1890. Leggott collection, Auckland

As biographer Richard Holmes famously wrote, biography is ‘a kind of pursuit, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past, a following of footsteps’. You will never catch them, he wrote, ‘But maybe, if you were lucky, you might write about the pursuit of that fleeting figure in such a way as to bring it alive in the present.’

Poet, editor and academic Michele Leggott came across that fleeting figure as part of her research into 19^th century poets. In New Plymouth, she and her team encountered painter, engineer and land surveyor Edwin Harris. From here, they began piecing together the story of the Harris family, ‘who sailed, mapped, gardened, sang, played, wrote, recited, taught, painted, drew and danced their way across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.’

When academic Catherine Field-Dodgson, who had done her thesis on botanical art by female artists in 1880s’ New Zealand, signed up to ‘Team Emily’, the project that would become this book took flight.

Emily Cumming Harris, Dicksonia squarrosa, hand-coloured lithograph, 306 x 245mm, plate 1 in New Zealand Ferns, Nelson, HD Jackson, 1890. Field-Dodgson collection, Wellington

The writing is vivid, each chapter beginning with a scene written in present tense, revealing the vulnerability of the unseeing past while also bringing Harris into sharp, albeit brief focus. It begins as a colonial tale. By 1840, Edwin has fallen on hard times. Following a stint in debtors’ prison, he, his pregnant wife Sarah and three young children board the William Byron, the first of the Plymouth Company’s ships bound for New Zealand. Sarah is weakening. Her medication is ill-advised. Her son is born, her son dies, ’sewn into a piece of canvas and dropped into the Pacific Ocean off Van Dieman’s Land’.

As she lingers in her cabin, Edwin picks up his paintbrush. In watercolour and pencil, he illustrates the ship’s approach first into Port Underwood, then into Taranaki. He is a fine painter. The ship lists, Taranaki nudges the clouds, as the passengers, unseen, head blindly into the maelstrom of precarious land claims and defective deeds of purchase.

Edwin Harris, Waiwhakaiho River scene, 1866, oil on canvas, 1305 x 1880mm. Puke Ariki, A64.650

Edwin is employed as a surveyor with Plymouth Company, drawing lines through forests and winding rivers, marking the transfer of Te Āti Awa land into Company ownership. But really all he wants to do is paint. He learns te reo, becomes a bush farmer. Sarah homeschools the children.

By 1859 Emily is working as a lady companion for the Des Voeux family at their idyllic homestead Glenavon. As Waikato and Taranaki iwi join forces against European settlers, they hunker down first in New Plymouth then Hobart (one of her poems, a romantic elegy for Glenavon, combines the ruin of the garden with her grief over her brother’s death in the Taranaki wars).

In 1865, Harris reunites with her family at 34 Nile St in Nelson. Here, the ‘being and doing’ begins. She paints, exhibits, submits her work to international shows. The family is poor; Edwin is ageing. Describing Harris’ bid to raise subscriptions for a fourth book, ethnographer William Skinner writes, ‘I’m afraid she will never have the means to publish her work on the Mountain flora of N.Z., poor soul. She must be very poor but she puts on a brave face.’

She is brave. With two of her sisters, she sets up a boarding and day school. She curates a successful travelling exhibition of her, Ellen and Edwin’s artwork. She works with botanists and ‘gentleman scientists’, transcribing their collections of alpine and subantarctic flora into finely executed, glowing illustrations, sharing their enthusiasm for rare endemic species.

Emily Cumming Harris, Celmisia chapmanii – Campbell Island; Celmisia vernicosa – Campbell Island, 1890s, watercolour, 310 x 440mm. Alexander Turnbull Library, C-023-018

Liker Holmes’ fleeting figure, Harris flickers across the pages. Many of her poems, copied into private letters, are now lost to time, fire or undiscovered archives. Diaries have been burned; paintings left uncatalogued, unphotographed or misattributed. Works on fans, screens and table-tops have been subjected to ‘wear and tear, changes in fashion and ultimate disposal’.

It is commonplace, the authors write, that art and writing by women have gone ‘undetected and under-estimated’. Botanical art in particular was frequently passed off as a ‘feminine pastime’. Here however, the authors of Groundwork apply an academic rigour to their subject, tracking down some 200 images and ten poems through books, letters, catalogues, auction houses, museum collections, archives at Taranaki Museum (now part of Puke Ariki), Te Papa and the Alexander Turnbull Library, where Harris’ lost folio of mountain flora will eventually turn up.

Now, a century since Harris’ death in Nelson Hospital, Groundwork gives excellent recognition to one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s first professional women artists, slowing Holmes’ fleeting figure to appreciate the fine detail and sensibility that Emily Harris brought to her art.

Emily Harris wearing a plaited straw bonnet trimmed with gathered tulle, satin, lace, white flowers and decorations that look like tiny bells. Glass-plate negative, c.1898. Nelson Provincial Museum, Tyree Studio Collection, 55512