Joseph Annabell – Douglas Lloyd Jenkins

[Recording begins mid-sentence]

Rose Chapman: … Douglas Lloyd Jenkins, the director of the Hawke’s Bay Museum Art Gallery; today his talk is going to be about somebody whose name we should know in Hawke’s Bay, but I had certainly never heard of him until I started my Duart research, and then I got very interested because Joseph Annabell was related to the family that built Duart House. He was the uncle by marriage of Hannah Chambers McLean. Her mother’s sister was married to Joseph Annabell, so there’s a connection there with Duart, and we always like to establish that. All right, I’ll pass you over to Douglas; thank you very much, Douglas.

Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins: Thank you, Rose. Well thank you for this invitation; I was going to say that part of the ploy of this was to lure some Annabells into the same room, and I think we’ve done that – quick show of hands, Annabell relatives? Excellent. And I think one of the things is that really, I’m here as an art historian rather than as a family genealogist. So the Annabell family is actually really quite well traced; it’s quite an interesting and complicated family that does connect into Hawke’s Bay in a lot of ways, but that’s part of what I’m talking about but it’s not what I’m talking about. I want to acknowledge that what we know about Annabell, and even what, say, the possibilities of what we’re planning to do with Annabell are based on this book here, ‘Joseph Annabell’, by Lyn Annabell. There’s going to be in my talk a little inherent criticism of this book, particularly the terrible quality of the reproduction. But [microphone interference] I would also like to point out that this book was written in 1982 and it really is quite a pioneering work of colonial art history, so although we might be a bit mean about it thirty years later – or I might be – it’s actually a wonderful little book. So it’s a contradiction to start with. And also, a second contradiction is that really, research about Joseph Annabell – it isn’t very hard or very complicated, because there he is, [chuckles] within a few miles, or not very far away. It’s all in the Havelock North cemetery in a very, very large, very impressive plot, occupied by his wife. So, end of book. [Chuckles]

What I suppose I’m more interested in doing is trying to trace Joseph Annabell’s … works by this artist, and getting an understanding of why we should be interested in Annabell, and not only why people in Hawke’s Bay should be interested, but why the country should be interested as a whole, because I think he’s a very important painter.

Joseph Annabell was born in Mansfield, Nottingham in 1815; that’s a slightly later image of course. He maintains a peripheral presence through the records in the town of Derby, before marrying Mary Chambers there in 1839. Derby was not a town unknown for art, and of course the most famous son of Derby is the famous painter whose name was actually Joseph Wright of Derby, to differentiate him from other Joseph Wrights. This is a generation before Annabell, but Joseph Wright is a very well-known painter. This is called ‘Cottage on Fire at Night’; he was very, very good at this sort of apocalyptic night-time gloom, and he went on later to paint early paintings of the industrial revolution with sort of fiery furnaces, suggesting this sort of notion of hell emerging on a bucolic landscape. He’s also very famous for a painting that many of us would’ve grown up with, especially if you had, like I did, Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia; which is the painting of the bird inside a suction pump, with a whole lot of doctors sucking the air out of the pump, and of course proving it needed air to breathe and killing off the poor bird. But it’s one of those great [chuckles] early nineteenth century narrative paintings that you can read a different sort of doom and gloom into.

So the fact that Annabell grew up in Derby as a young man [coughing] doesn’t mean he was disconnected from the art world. However there’s little evidence of any … well, there’s little real detail of the art training that Annabell might’ve received in his early years. His biography by Lyn Annabell simply states that Joseph took formal art lessons, and this is based primarily on surviving evidence of paintings of sculpture that might’ve been part of formal lessons. And right through until World War II drawing from casts was a popular way of teaching students to model on classical form [cough] and was considered more proper than life modelling.

As I said, he married Mary Chambers in 1839. The Chambers were a Quaker family, and it’s highly unlikely that they would be much impressed by their daughter marrying a young artist with no particular future. But interestingly, it turns out that Joseph was most likely also a blacksmith. This is interesting, the notion of blacksmith/artist – they seem to us to be sort of two contradictions really, although both of them are craft forms. In 1852, Joseph and Mary Chambers and their two children decided to leave for Melbourne on board the ship ‘Chalmers’; this is not the ‘Chalmers’, but this a contemporary immigrant ship heading for Melbourne. And of course in the 1850s lots of people were heading to Melbourne for the Victorian gold rush. Annabell luckily kept quite a [cough] detailed shipboard diary, and this is where we really get to understand Joseph Annabell the blacksmith, because he was making small water filters out of metal and selling them to other people on ship. And then he realised that after a while he was teaching people on the ship to make these water filters, so when he arrives in Melbourne he signs the passenger list as Joseph Annabell, Blacksmith.

However, we get another side of Joseph on board the ship because in his diary he keeps a little record; and it says, ‘£2/12/6 [two pounds twelve and sixpence] for Mr Birch’s portrait; £2/12/6 for Mr Potter’s portrait; £2/12/6 (this is a long trip) for Mrs Poyser’s portrait, and the same sum for Mr Taylor’s portrait. Indeed, £2/12/6 seems to be the sum paid out for the Meskers and the Meskers, a Mr Roberts and a Master Roberts, so all and all, a healthy sum was made.’ And that Annabell was entrepreneurial is also recorded alongside his diary, because clearly he brought on board a good supply of liquor, which he was also selling … [Inaudible due to laughter] I don’t know if he had to get his sitters drunk before they … [inaudible, laughter] but he was clearly some sort of entrepreneurial character. And what we know from that, is that there are at least six to eight Annabell portraits that must exist, or possibly exist, somewhere in Melbourne.

Joseph Annabell arrived there in 1852, as I said – signed on passenger list as a [cough] blacksmith. His period in Melbourne is something of a mystery, but he does record in his diary … this is the tent town if you sailed for Melbourne – Melbourne was growing so fast that it couldn’t accommodate everyone. I’ll just read a little bit from his diary:

‘We had to pay £3/12/- [three pounds and twelve shillings] to get to the tent ground with our luggage. We could not get a house and we lived in a tent for several weeks. I got in a few days of house painting, for which I had £4 [four pounds] per week.’ I imagine that’s painting houses, not pictures of houses.

‘This seems a good sum, but things are very expensive here; you may pay £1 a week for an empty room made of wood, about as good as Mr Morley’s stables. Cabbage costs 1/6d [one shilling and sixpence] each; peas 1/- per quart in their husks. Potatoes, 6d [sixpence] per pound; onions, 10d [tenpence] per pound; fresh butter, 3/- [three shillings] a pound. After we had been in the tent for a few weeks, I was taken poorly. We took a room for which we had to pay 15/- [fifteen shillings] a week, and this was only wood. But I have good health now and the rest of us are well, and the children extremely, exceedingly well. They’re all eating like threshers now.’ [Chuckles]

‘I am making filters at £4/10/- [four pounds ten shillings] a week now, but I intend to get into building houses if my filters do not sell.’ It’s really unclear what Annabell got up to in Australia. It’s fairly clear that he travelled around; probably, I suspect, not so much in prospecting for gold but making money from the peripheral world of the gold rush. He seems to – at this point – have stayed away from any of the organised art societies or art events of the day. There’s no record of him having exhibited paintings in Melbourne that we’ve yet been able to discover.

However, it wasn’t working out for him and by 1860 he and his wife, with now two additional children, headed for New Zealand, arriving in Napier in 1860. Napier was an obvious place for the family to come, Mary’s brother, John Chambers, having established himself very securely in Hawke’s Bay. However, for an artist, Hawke’s Bay probably held little promise, and particularly for an artist like Joseph Annabell. Where Annabell is important for Hawke’s Bay is his claim – or the claim I’m going to make for him – to be Hawke’s Bay’s first resident artist. Artists might’ve travelled through, although it should be said that Hawke’s Bay remained relatively free from the map of New Zealand’s early painters; and also, amateur sketchers were quite well-known. Eloise Taylor at the museum, down there in the front row, has done excellent work on Edward Lyndon; his special claim is to be Hawke’s Bay’s first accountant. I don’t know if that’s quite as grand as being Napier’s first painter, but unlike most contemporary accountants he was an amateur artist and sketcher, and this is very lovely little drawing of Balquhidder House on Napier Hill from, I think, 1871. But he was an accountant and land dealer, and really a lot of these images were a way of selling property, so they’re kind of the equivalent of the real estate agent’s billboard. Edward Lyndon had arrived in Napier a couple of years before Annabell on the little steamer, ‘Wonga Wonga’, which is again, something that Eloise has written about on the Napier Athenaeum website, in June 1858. And pretty soon after that we encounter Lyndon’s own pencil sketches of the very, very early settlement. So this is this tiny little settlement of Napier, April [18]58, and he’s actually detailed along the bottom the names of houses. Now, that drawing gets zhuzhed up for promotional purposes, ‘cause remember, they’re trying to sell this place as somewhere you might want to come and stay;  but Napier’s not large. So this is the Napier to which Annabell arrives, and so you’ve got this painter who specialises in portraiture arriving to a town of this size. Now what it says along the bottom there is names of each [coughing] building: William Colenso, that’s the little house up on the top of the hill, which is demolished; the Registered Deeds Office; Harris house; Tiffen house; The Herald Office; J Anderson; Sealy; Reverend Marshall; The Land Office … Napier 1861. Some of those names crop up again. So this is, in essence, the place with no painter. In the Victorian world, [coughing] a real artist worked [inaudible] … Lindauer would not arrive until 1881, and Joseph Gaut [coughing] and Jamie Perritt who were both resident – Gaut in Hastings and Perritt in Napier – didn’t arrive until the 1890s. And again, both the lives of Perritt and Gaut in Hawke’s Bay are on the Napier Athenaeum website for anybody who wants to have a look.

So this is no place for a painter; a real painter works in oil, so you’ve got Joseph Annabell who’s our first kind of real painter, and he’s living here, he’s not just travelling through. And if you look at people like Perritt, what they would do … they kind of ran a bit of a scheme really; they would arrive in Napier or Hastings, and they would announce that this was the most beautiful place, and as artists, they were going to come here and live. And so, everyone would go, “Oh, this is amazing, we’ve got this major, major painter coming to live here – aren’t we fantastic?” They would put together a first big exhibition and everyone would buy everything, and then they’d go, “Oh look, sorry”, [chuckle] “not [able] to come and stay after all.” And then they’d move to Gisborne … “Oh, Gisborne’s the most beautiful place in the world …” [Chuckles] But Annabell, the rest of his life was spent here, so he becomes our resident painter.

Okay, so he’s arrived, but first of all, before I talk about his painting we’ll settle him in a bit. Perhaps obviously, he took up residence with the family at Te Mata Station, with Mary’s brother, John. He worked on a number of farms around the region, probably as blacksmith or general farm hand, before building a house in an area on the Tukituki [River], still called Undercliff after that house, which seems to have been destroyed by fire or flood, and basically the book allows you to take your pick. And then the family moved to Oaklands in Havelock North, which the home of the Boyle family into whom their eldest daughter married, and Joseph Annabell actually spends the rest of his life until he dies in the 1890s, at Oaklands.

Annabell’s painting of [the] Tiffen house in the Hawke’s Bay Museum & Art Gallery collection is his major work, at least so far. It’s certainly the work that drew my attention to the artist and it is his most widely published work, although I’ve got to say at this extent that’s not saying a great deal; it appears in two books. But one of those is a very good book on the history of the New Zealand Garden by Christopher Johnson, through the eyes of painters, and it’s considered a very interesting work in terms of early colonial gardens.

This is the home of Henry Tiffen, built in Napier in the 1850s, and singled out in Lyndon’s drawings as one of the key buildings in the new settlement. This painting is unusual, and it hints at Annabell’s special status as a resident painter rather than an adventurer or a salesman. This is a portrait of domestic harmony designed to be treasured by the Tiffen family; and compared to Lyndon’s works which encourage [?] to come and build alongside this house in a speculative way, this one concentrates on domesticity and particularly the notion of garden and garden activity. The house remained in Napier until the 1950s when it was pulled down, and it’s now where Tiffen Park is behind the Municipal Theatre. This is a lovely work, and one of first things lets us know really, the fantastic detail, which is why it was speculative … with this wonderful colour. What we do know about this painting is that Annabell worked from photographs; this is a photograph which we’ve placed in the gallery collection. Yeah, I think it’s really important that we don’t disparage Victorian painters that use photography on which to base their works; it was an incredibly important tool, and we’re often, I think, quite hard on painters that [who] use photography as a tool, but a lot of painters do but we don’t always have the photograph to prove it. Doesn’t make Annabell less of a painter – the house is still a pretty spectacular piece of work. We got a later photograph of the same, the same people playing croquet on the lawn, but the yucca [had] died. [Chuckles] We see this unusual arrangement of domesticity against a background of family activity in other works.

That’s as Pam said, a blurry [??] out with an ‘A’. Joseph Annabell was one of those supremely annoying painters who very rarely signed his works, so most of Annabell’s are unsigned; we need to attribute them. But this is a rare appearance of the ‘A J’ signature initials. There are not many paintings that just have ‘A J’ written on it, just ‘cause he painted Joseph Annabell. So, this was really quite common; it’s one thing that we kind of don’t understand ‘cause we live in this ego driven world of the contemporary painter, but Victorian painters often thought that modesty was a virtue, and if you’re the only painter in town, why would you sign your paintings, ‘cause everyone knows who did them. It’s just a hundred and fifty years later it becomes problem.

This is called ‘Elizabeth Anne and Horse’, and is believed to’ve been painted at Rissington where Joseph Annabell worked on … these are the reproductions from the book, and one of the things I’m very keen on is to find where these works now lie. This is a lovely little work, and most unusual in New Zealand painting; and it’s got this lovely suggestion of this sort of house and gate. In the background we see a bit more, and this lovely juxtaposition between the woman, the house and the dog.

This is an early work that was painted in England, and this is called ‘Mary in England’, so it’s obviously painted before 1852, and it’s a little bit hard to see but it’s got a house in the background, and again, these children and animal combinations were very popular with Annabell, where you can tell – and this lovely one too, of a child and two dogs in front of a house – this is called ‘Main and the Boyle Homestead’, and that’s the Boyle family house, which I believe no longer exists, in the background. But there’s something really interesting about these works … there’s something not quite right about these works in terms of their scale. There’s a certain naïveté about them that suggests to me that Annabell didn’t have a lot of formal training, but that’s also [cough] something deeply engaging about them; very, very charming about them.

Not everyone in the time was comfortable with them. This is probably two Annabell grandchildren of the banks of the Waikato River. Joseph’s oldest son, Joseph Annabell, the second junior, became a very important surveyor and ended up in Wanganui, so then a lot of the Annabell family ended up in Wanganui, descended from that line; and obviously, this is probably that Joseph’s grandchildren. [Coughing] But this exhibited in Wanganui in the 1880s, and this is quite unusual ‘cause Annabell didn’t seem to exhibit a lot. But one art critic of the day was rather perplexed by this work, and he wrote: ‘There is a singular picture at the exhibition which, owing perhaps to the technical and almost repulsive nature of the subject, has led to escape detection. It seems to have puzzled the compilers of the catalogue, for although numbered – Number 74 – and stated to be the property of a Mr Joseph Annabell, it bears no name whatsoever. A medical man, however, will at once see what it is meant for; two children and a large dog, everyone of the three suffering from advanced hydrocephalitis, [hydrocephalus] [laughter] or dropsy of the brain, [laughter] and are standing on the brink of a lake; and although flowers and playthings lie at the feet of the poor suffering children, [it] is evident from the pain depicted on their countenance[s] that their thoughts run to suicide’. [Laughter]

He hasn’t finished yet; you know, I think if you had received that today you wouldn’t be very happy. But he finishes off by saying: ‘Medical subjects as a rule are to be depreciated in a general exhibition, but this production of the artist, whoever he may be, deserves more attention than it has yet received from the general public’. So sort of a backhand compliment there, but pretty strange. But it’s one of the things that I think is important about Annabell; it makes him stand out amongst 19th century painters. This is not how we think of early New Zealand painting; this is not how we think about painting in the 1860s and 1870s in New Zealand, and that gives Joseph Annabell a chance to stand out in the 21st century – I believe that very strongly.

He also represented New Zealand in the Melbourne exhibition of 1882, [showing slides] and there you’ve got Joseph Annabell with [a] horse, [?Papapapa?]; a mare called Kate; [???] table of fruit – very Hawke’s Bay; and a portrait of Sir Douglas McLean. The other artists we don’t really know very well – they’ve all fallen into obscurity with the exception of Charles Blomfield. And this is really good example of a Blomfield, so that’s what New Zealand painting of the 1860s, 1870s was supposed to look like, and it’s a very long way from our ‘dropsy of the brain’ friend. [Laughter] And so, Joseph Annabell’s the sort of painter you can connect to, because he doesn’t fall into the melee of Hoytes and Gullys and Blomfields; you know, he stands out as something special. This was part of his taonga found in Tasman Smith that we received a couple of years ago, but again, that’s what we think of as being nineteenth century New Zealand painting.

This is a reproduction of the McLean portrait’; it’s whereabouts is unknown. It is from [a] famous photograph of McLean. Portrait painting is one of those areas in which it must be said that Annabell took something of a gamble. He was a man, as I said, that painted from photographs; he had a close relationship with Samuel Carnell, as Lindauer did later on. But he could never’ve guessed that as New Zealand developed it would increasingly reject the portrait. Where reputation has been made in New Zealand painting in the nineteenth century, it’s been made by landscape painters. Annabell’s oeuvre of family groups, portraits, horse portraits and still lives are still a fairly sophisticated brew for New Zealanders.

Amongst his most famous portraits are the joint matching portraits of Reverend and Mrs Marshall, and remember, Reverend Marshall’s home was on that little [?] of Lyndons, and these are excellent examples of Annabell’s skill as a portrait painter. William Marshall was the first schoolmaster in Hawke’s Bay, moving here in 1852, so he was a new arrival; him [he] and William Colenso ended up being arch enemies, [?] together as they used to in those days. In 1855 he founded the Napier Trust School on the corner of Hastings and Tennyson Street[s] and became its first headmaster; later became headmaster of Napier Grammar School. What I think is interesting about these two portraits is actually the history of them within the organisation of the Hawke’s Bay Museum and Art Gallery, now.

This is a bit like airing out dirty washing in public, but I’ll do it, and my staff can slap me later. When Annabell died in 1893, William Colenso wrote in his diary: ‘The old pioneer, Joseph Annabell has died. Those are his portraits hanging in the Philosophical Institute, of the Reverend and attitudinous Mrs Marshall.’ [Chuckles] And I think it’s a wonderful description of Mrs Marshall looking very ‘attitudinous’. [Laughter] So this is a rarity for us – these are two paintings that we still have that we know were hanging in the Napier Athenaeum building in 1893. That’s what they look like now. That’s what she looked like when I came on board; she had lost her frame and had had a few holes poked in her, and that was after a hundred and ten years in our care. And this tells you really, what the trajectory of fashion around colonial paintings and colonial portraiture has been, and the realisation that we do have the photographs from which these paintings were painted, probably made earlier. People at the museum think they were inferior works; as I said, we have a strange relationship with the way we think about paintings that use photography. So by the 2000s they were abandoned, frameless and damaged, and the [?text was spoilt?]; we began to [china clinking] realise that they were important and they went for conservation at Auckland Art Gallery. And that’s her now, and what we always like to see is those things alongside each other. So you can see what a beautiful job has been done on Mrs Marshall; and there’s the Reverend and Mrs Marshall. James, our framer, put two and two together and realised two abandoned old picture frames that we were using for mirrors actually were the Marshall’s original frames, [murmurs] so they’ve now been stored, conserved and reunited in their frames. They’ll be in one of our opening exhibitions, and they are really great treasures of the collection, so even though we broke them in the first place we have, I hope, redeemed ourselves. [Chuckles]

Portrait painting … these are portraits we’re still looking to locate. The Annabell book tells us they were in family collections in 1982, and we’re just starting the process of tracing those. This is a most unusual portrait of the son, Joseph. What you’ve got to do is sort of look; these reproductions don’t really suggest how wonderful these paintings were [inaudible] …

Now this one here’s quite a good one too to look at; Annabell had certain interests as a painter, and things like that he was very, very proud of. One of those was his ability to paint spectacles, and the other was his ability to depict jewellery. You’ll also notice that he’s not so good at hands, and so he brings out a bit of the [?]. [Chuckles] That’s all right, at least he did it with a number of fingers crossed.

This is his wife, Mary Chambers; and this one is one the first ones that I’ve located still within the family, so there’s the new work. and so, that’s a good indication of the quality we can expect to see between the old reproduction and the new one. Here’s a close-up detail of the brooch that she is wearing, and [it] actually still remains in the family, but also, you can see that, again like our own paintings, this is a work that needs some attention. And as I said, he’s very proud of his ability to depict spectacles.

He’s a supremely confident horse painter, and it’s probably one of the ways he really made money. He is a mystery – he really doesn’t appear in the newspapers; he doesn’t exhibit with exhibiting institutions; but he’s working here for twenty-something years, so there’s got to be a lot of work out there. Now the Annabell book concentrates on the works that were in the museum at the time, and the works that were in the family; and there’s got to be more work out there. For example, we don’t seem to have a Chambers family portrait. Now it would seem rather unusual that Joseph Annabell wasn’t painting his family, in that extended sense. There’s no portrait of William Colenso, which seems unusual given that there’s a famous Lindauer portrait of William Colenso, and it was such a small area; though, as we know, Colenso fell from fashion very much in that he was more a friend of the Marshalls – we don’t know. So there’s got to be a lot of Annabell works out there.

So this is a lovely horse painting; one day I would like to an exhibition on the history of horse painting in Hawke’s Bay because there’s some fantastic people … Gaut, who I mentioned before, basically lived in Hastings because he could make money as a horse painter. Another one – this is this lovely combination of the homestead and the horse, and this wonderful sense of scale there.

This is one that’s in our collection that’s yet to be restored; it’s a small portrait of an unknown subject matter, so I’d be very interested if anyone recognises that face of his family member or anybody else. It doesn’t relate to any photograph we have, but is a very fine portrait, quite an early one, I suspect.

And that is a self-portrait, and I put that up last because Joseph Annabell … he does seem to be a very modest creature. If you look, for example, at the self-portraits of people like Lindauer – they do big splashy self-portraits of themselves as artists, with brushes and easels, and looking very romantic. But Annabell belongs to an earlier generation; that’s just the detail of the actual portrait which is why it’s a very sort of modest portrait. There are no surviving ones I’ve been able to find yet of Annabell, but there are some family albums. So a fascinating and modest but very, very accomplished character.

Joseph Annabell’s bicentenary will be 2015, and we’ll be working towards an exhibition of his works; we’re trying to find as many of those as we can. I believe that he is a very important painter that [who] relates very strongly to English and to Australian painting, and I think he’s a really good person for us to look at, and in a way the Hawke’s Bay Museum [?] specialises in bringing people that deserve attention back again. The problem with Annabell, it is two hundred years since he was born; it’s more than a hundred years since he died, so tracing surviving evidence is a very difficult thing to do. So that’s why I said I wanted to lure some Annabells into the room, but I also wanted you to perhaps help out and be very aware of where you know of nineteenth century portraiture in homes and families that either carry the J A, or have an obsession with jewellery and spectacles; [laughter] be it large horses, and school houses, and dropsy of the brain [laughter] and hopefully we can put enough of Annabell’s story together to make the rest of the country [inaudible]. So thank you very much.

[Applause]

Question: I’ve got a colour photograph of a man, something like that last picture …

Douglas: Right – yeah, well let’s try. Send that to me.

Closing address: Well, its my fortunate job to say thank you to Douglas for coming along today. I hope everyone has found this as fascinating as I have – we’ll all go home and look at everything on the walls. [Chuckles] So I feel that I’m the apt person to be here because of course I have a dog, and I wish Joseph Annabell was still around to paint my dog. [Chuckles] So Douglas on behalf of the Society …

Douglas: Oh, thank you, Rose.

[Applause]