Blomfield’s Terraces

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 20, Issue 1, 1 May 1987, Page 9

Blomfield’s Terraces

ROGER BLACKLEY

The number of this painter's works are undoubted prooj of his industry. 1 “Blomfield in Wonderland” should not become a proverb. 2

The replicas Charles Blomfield produced of his famous terrace paintings have no real parallel in New Zealand art. Blomfield kept a manuscript book of‘Picture Sales’, covering the early part of his career, in which he recorded transactions involving more than 200 terrace pictures in the decade before 1892. 3 Blomfield continued to paint the terraces throughout his career, and a huge canvas of Rotomahana stood unfinished on his easel when he died in 1926. 4 What is the meaning of this vast chain of cloned pictures? How did it all begin? And what was its significance for Blomfield’s career?

He first visited the world-renowned pink and white terraces during a camping trip in the summer of 1875-76. Blomfield and his friend Thomas Spurgeon camped at Rotomahana (‘all by ourselves on the spot so many have come thousands of miles to see’) from New Year’s Eve until 3 January, and left amid accusations of trespass and vandalism from the Tuhourangi of nearby Te Wairoa. 5 Although tourists in 1876 were still being encouraged to make indelible inscriptions on the very surface of the terraces, the appropriation of specimens of silica formation had finally been forbidden, as had visitors without Maori guides. Blomfield’s journal does not refer directly to painting, an habitual activity, but the several terrace pictures he records selling before 1883 must be based on sketches he made during this visit. He returned with his wife early in 1883, when he made the sketches on which he based the Rotomahana canvases exhibited with the Society of Arts in April 1883. Particularly acclaimed were two large pictures now in a private Auckland collection, showing tourists and Maori guides visiting both terraces. During 1884, Blomfield made arrangements to return to Rotomahana for an extended painting trip. Remembering the trouble of 1876, he negotiated rights to camp and paint through Te Wairoa schoolteacher and friend Charles Haszard. The Auckland Weekly News reported on these negotiations:

The Maoris are a very conservative people concerning their customs and privileges, but one by one these customs and privileges, sometimes very obstructive

ones, are being broken down. It has been the custom to allow no-one to visit Rotomahana unless in the native boat or accompanied by a native guide; but our local artist, Mr Charles Blomfield, who has been negotiating for some weeks past with the principal chiefs of Rotomahana, has at length obtained their consent to allow him to go there alone. He intends to take a boat, and camp on the shores of Rotomahana for some weeks, and thoroughly explore the district. Instead of trusting to a few rapid sketches as hitherto, he intends to take a number of canvasses and paint direct from nature, thus getting a much more truthful representation of the many strange and beautiful sights in this wonderland of the antipodes. Mr Blomfield expects to exhibit some of these pictures at the forthcoming exhibition of the Society of Arts in April. 6

Blomfield spent six weeks that summer at Rotomahana in the company of his eight-year-old daughter. Mary amazed tourists by frolicking in the steaming landscape, as her father painstakingly worked up a series of twelve canvases. Blomfield documented the trip in an invaluable series of letters to his wife, in which he reveals his method of working on the same picture on various days, as atmospheric and/or geothermal conditions recurred. 7 He mentions initial troubles with aTe Ariki chief he calls ‘Thompson the Thundercloud’, and describes the arrival of photographer George Valentine with associate George Chapman in January 1885. At first he suspects them of having jumped our claim, and I believe pitched their tent in the very place I cleared for ours’. 8 That evening Blomfield visited the photographers and reported Valentine (whom he calls Ballantyne) as saying ‘another wet day would be enough for him’. 9 Instead the weather cleared,

and Valentine exposed his wonderful series of views. Early in the stay Blomfield wrote requesting ‘five or six of my cards’, and ‘also a piece of transferring paper, black one side and dark green the other, on my shelf near the hole in the chimney’. 10 Regular groups of tourists encountered him at work painting the terraces, and this is where he received his first orders. The request for transferring paper indicates that he may have begun his production of replicas while still in the Hot Lakes district.

Seven of the ‘originals’ were hung among the loan works at the April exhibition. The Star reviewer wrote: ‘The Rotomahana studies demand the first notice . . . These were all painted on the spot, with the object of getting the tints as true to nature as paint could make them. They were mostly rough, and would require to be worked up with care’. 11 That Blomfield was indeed working them up with care is revealed by his ‘Picture Sales’, where he lists the names of the clients throughout the world who were receiving terrace pictures. His greatest coup was the inclusion of fourteen Rotomahana canvases in London’s Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886. These were on display when Tarawera erupted, destroying the terraces. The paintings sold for a total of 180 guineas, and resulted in yet more orders for replicas.

Despite occasional critical disparagement of his ‘panoramawork’, most newspaper commentary of the 1880 s was supportive of what was seen as a patriotic activity. Here is the Herald commenting on several Rotomahana views on display in a Queen Street shop window in September 1885.

The weird grandeur of the Hot Lake district and the exquisite beauty of the terraces are fast becoming known as “the sight of the world”, and anything tending to bring the unique scenery of our island home under the notice of people at home and on the Continent will help to bring about this desirable result .... There is no doubt Mr Blomfield in a quiet way is doing a great deal to advertise New Zealand as a favourite resort for the tourist and the traveller. His pictures are intensely realistic and true in form and colour, and to people at home give an accurate idea of the Lake scenery. These pictures are already being well distributed, orders having been received and executed from tourists hailing from London, France, Germany, America, Australia, and other places. 1-

All this was extremely good for business, as Blomfield’s financial records indicate. ‘Picture Sales’ declares an income for 1885 of £434 145., of which no less than £3OB 4s. comes from the sale of terrace paintings. This income is significantly up on 1883 (£257 155.) and in 1884 (£219.105), and a dramatic improvement over earlier years such as 1878 (£53 Is.) and 1879 (£3O).

In the period before the eruption ot 10 June 1886, sixty terrace paintings appear in the sequence titled ‘Pictures Sold’, to which we can add the fourteen he sent to the Indian and Colonial Exhibition. The production of yet more pre-eruption terraces is recorded in a separate sequence of‘Pictures Sent away for Sale’. Here under July 1885 we find eleven terrace paintings ‘sent to Hot Lakes on exhibition’, a consignment each to the Lake House, Pallace [sic] Hotel, and Rotomahana Hotel. Through such industry and entrepreneurship, Blomfield secured his position as the most successful landscape painter in Auckland during the 1880 s. However, this obsessive copying ol his own work inevitably led to a degradation of Blomfield’s reputation. The sheer quantity of the replicas —painted on canvases, panels, cardboard, and shells — almost overwhelms the possibility of grasping a wider oeuvre. That is, Blomfield made his name virtually synonymous with the terraces. The popular idea that works bearing pre-eruption dates are in some sense the ‘real’ terraces, while the later ones are merely ‘fantasies’, is an understandable response in the face of such a host of pictures. Yet such a notion cannot adequately deal with the later masterpieces, and it also disguises the true nature of Blomfield’s entire project.

Although they were painted largely in response to a perceived demand by tourists, Blomfield’s terrace pictures rarely admit any indication of tourist activity at Rotomahana. The lake and the terraces appear tranquil, populated sometimes by a tew Maori figures, but more often devoid of any human sign. The delicate tendrils of Te Tarata’s basins are fixed in a state of pristine glory more comparable to early watercolours such as Heaphy’s celebrated view, than to the actual state revealed by photographers contemporary to Blomfield. Despite the ideology of truth to nature that

motivated his painstaking field work ol January 1885, the replicas both before and after the eruption promote a nostalgic vision of Rotomahana in its ‘native purity’, uncontaminated by tourism. The selective nature of Blomfield’s ‘truth’ can likewise be seen in his ability, in the midst of forestry’s devastating progress, to find remnants of sylvan bush in which to sketch. His researches into the picturesque, fairly typical of his time, do not necessarily mean that Blomfield was blind to nature’s essential fragility, to the real changes that were so typical of his time. Long after the cataclysmic eruption, he wrote the following account of how tourism inevitably transformed the landscape:

Rotomahana was unique. There was never anything like it before, and will never be again. It was beginning to be known as one of the sights of the world. The number of tourists visiting it doubled every few months. Soon the Government would have taken control and then all kinds of incongruous ‘improvements’ would have been introduced. The Maoris may have control of a beauty spot for years without altering its natural aspects, but as soon as the European steps in it soon loses its native purity. They form shell paths and build trim shelters at Whakarewarewa, turn the slopes of Ruapehu into a Scotch Highlands, and make a hideous wilderness of many a fine stretch of bush. One dreads to think of what Rotomahana would have looked like with shelters, tea kiosks, signboards, steam launches and perhaps a big hotel just where I pitched my tent. 13

Nevertheless, tourism remained the context for Blomfield’s terrace-replica business. His ‘Gallery of New Zealand Art’ in the Victoria Arcade lay between the wharves and the hotels, and adver-

tisements in the newspapers advised that ‘Tourists and Visitors to Auckland are especially invited to view the collection’. 14 Within this studio-shop, the terrace replicas functioned as up-market versions of the photographic views that were avidly collected by tourists long after the eruption had transformed Rotomahana. The huge editions of the photographs and the endlessly cloned oil paintings together played a part in constructing that particularly potent New Zealand folk myth: the Legend of the Lost Terraces.

Buried under the weight of the replicas, the ‘original’ terrace pictures of 1885 need to be appreciated for their contribution to a plein-air tradition in which Blomfield was an important pioneer. At a time when virtually all pictures intended for exhibition were painted within a comfortable studio, Blomfield undertook arduous trips burdened with all the materials he needed to produce oil paintings on the spot. When exhibited, these paintings had ‘from Nature’ proudly appended to the titles. In this sense the true successors to the terrace ‘originals’ are not the replicas, but rather the melancholy series of oil sketches of post-eruption Rotomahana Blomfield made under difficult circumstances in October 1886, four months after the cataclysm. In these extraordinary views he carefully documented the radically altered landscape, choosing vantage points as close as possible to those of the earlier terrace series. 13 And back in Auckland, some of these views in turn became replicas within the ‘Gallery of New Zealand Art’.

REFERENCES 1 ‘Auckland Society of Arts’, New Zealand Herald, 12 April 1883, p. 5. 2 ‘Calamo Currente’, New Zealand Herald, 2 May 1885 (supplement), p.l. 3 Picture Sales, Auckland Institute and Museum Library, MS3O 4 Information from the present owner, a granddaughter of the artist. 5 Muriel Williams, Charles Blomfield, His Life and Times (Auckland, 1979), p. 52. The charge of vandalism was unjustified, but it is true that Blomfield’s axe (for chopping firewood) is the identical instrument that the scientist von Hochstetter advised as necessary for breaking off a specimen (in the commentary to D. L. Mundy’s Rotomahana, London, 1875). 6 Auckland Weekly News, 27 December 1884, p.lB. 7 For accurate transcriptions of these letters, now in the Auckland Institute and Museum Library, see Williams, Charles Blomfield, pp.6B-73. 8 ibid., p. 71. 9 ibid., p. 72. 10 ibid., p. 70. 11 ‘Society of Arts Exhibition’, Auckland Evening Star, 17 April 1885, p.2. 12 New Zealand Herald, 21 September 1885, p. 5. 13 ‘Painting the Terraces. A Departed Glory’, undated newspaper clipping, Blomfield papers, Auckland Institute and Museum Library. For the entire text see Williams, Charles Blomfield, pp. 74-77. 14 New Zealand Herald, 2 April 1888, p.B. 15 Blomfield stressed the comparative nature of his post-eruption work during a later debate over whether the terraces still existed (‘The Lost Terraces. Gone Forever’ New Zealand Herald, 1 February 1902 (supplement), p.l).