Many of the treasures in the National Art Collection have come into the museum as generous gifts – from collectors, artists, their families, and the public. To mark Te Papa Foundation’s Annual Appeal, Curator Modern Art Lizzie Bisley looks here at some of the wonderful artworks and collections that have been gifted to the nation over the past 157 years.
The Monrad Collection
The first major gift to the National Art Collection remains one of the most important and largest. In 1869, Bishop Monrad gave 600 engravings, etchings and woodcuts to the then Colonial Museum. The gift included work by major European artists of the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries, including Andrea Mantegna, Albrecht Dürer, Annibale Carracci, Antony van Dyck, Wenceslaus Hollar, and Rembrandt van Rijn.
Ditlev Gothard Monrad (1811–1887) was a prominent figure in nineteenth-century Denmark: a bishop in the Lutheran church, he was also a noted scholar and politician. He was a connoisseur of art, collecting fine prints by European old masters and contemporary Danish paintings. Monrad was prime minister of Denmark during the 1864 war against the German Confederation, led by Prussia. The Danes were defeated and lost considerable territory, and Monrad’s premiership ended in disrepute.
In March 1866, Monrad arrived in Lyttelton, New Zealand, with his family and five young Danish men who also wished to immigrate. Monrad eventually purchased land at Karere in the Manawatū, where he built a house and developed a farm. The family brought works of art with them, including Monrad’s collection of prints. But while other family members settled in New Zealand permanently, Monrad and his wife Emilie returned to Denmark in January 1869. Two days before leaving New Zealand, Monrad donated his print collection to the Colonial Museum. It remains one of the most significant parts of Te Papa’s historical art collection.
By public subscription
The Colonial Museum was founded in Wellington in 1865. Its first director, the geologist James Hector, was not particularly interested in forming an art collection – although the museum did acquire and commission many wonderful artworks as part of its scientific research.
After many years of lobbying, a dedicated National Art Gallery opened in 1936. The gallery’s founding collection came from the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, and included many important gifts. Among these were a large number of paintings that had been bought using subscriptions – where members of the public would see an artwork that they loved in an exhibition, and then donate what they could towards its acquisition into the Academy’s collection.
Many of the works acquired by public subscription were by British artists and were brought to New Zealand as part of touring exhibitions. But important works by New Zealanders were also acquired in this way. My favourite of these is probably Frances Hodgkins’ The hilltop, a watercolour that Hodgkins painted in France in about 1908.
This beautiful, airy painting is full of movement – rippled grass, billowing skirts and a cloud-scattered sky. When it was exhibited in Wellington in 1913, it was celebrated as an example of impressionism. One reviewer wrote that Hodgkins had ‘fairly let herself go … in the way of colour, and the light is … positively scintillating’.[1]
Twentieth-century collectors
In the early 1950s, two significant print collections were gifted to the National Art Gallery. Sir John Ilott, a Wellington businessman, gave a large collection of European etchings and engravings through a series of regular donations, the first made in 1952. The works in Ilott’s collection range from the 15th century to the 1930s, and brought into the gallery prints by modern artists such as Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri Matisse.
Although impossible to choose favourites in the richness of the Ilott gift, one group of works that I am fascinated by – and return to again and again – is the Marriage à la mode series, engravings based on paintings by the British artist William Hogarth. Engraved in 1745, these prints are wickedly funny satires of 18th-century London society.
At around the same time Sir John Ilott made his first gift, another rich collection came into the National Art Gallery from the gallerist and collector Rex Nan Kivell. Born in Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1898, Nan Kivell spent his war years stationed in England before becoming an art dealer in 1920s London. In the early 1950s, Nan Kivell gave large collections of 20th-century prints to each of Aotearoa’s main public art galleries. At Te Papa, this includes fabulous holdings of linocuts made by artists trained at London’s Grosvenor School, and a stunning group of British interwar wood engravings.
From the artist
Artists and their estates have also made many generous gifts to Te Papa. One intriguing artist donation is the 1947 painting The valley of dry bones, given by Colin McCahon in 1983. This is one of a series of paintings that McCahon did of biblical scenes in the late 1940s. These works situate biblical stories in New Zealand landscapes.
Here a figure quotes the Old Testament prophet Ezekiel, whose words are a plea for recovery and hope, after the horrors of war. This painting is a fascinating early example of McCahon’s use of text in his works – something that would come to define many of his paintings of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
In 2022, another important gift of modern New Zealand work was made by the Rita Angus Estate, which donated two watercolours painted by Angus during the Second World War. These works, Self-portrait (with moth and caterpillar) and Self-portrait (nude, seated), speak to Angus’ life and her pacifist beliefs during the war, while also reflecting her close observation of the natural world, and her interest in both surrealism and symbolism.
Recent gifts
The National Art Collection continues to be enriched by generous gifts from collectors, artists, and the public. In 2017, Euan and Ann Sinclair gifted 7 important works on paper to Te Papa, deepening and expanding our holdings of works by major international modernists. The gift included artworks by Salvador Dalí, André Lhote, Andy Warhol, Gino Severini, Joan Miró, and Nicolas Tarkhoff. It connects directly with Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history – in particular through André Lhote’s work, as so many early 20th-century New Zealand painters trained in Lhote’s Parisian studio. The Sinclair collection also extends our representation of Futurist, Surrealist and Pop art, helping us to tell a much fuller story of the history of modernist art.
Te Papa Foundation’s Annual Appeal
Te Papa is hugely grateful for the ongoing generosity of our donors. By giving works such as these, donors allow us to tell a rich, nuanced history of New Zealand art, while always also exploring our connections to the rest of the world.
Find out more about the Te Papa Foundation’s Annual Appeal.
[1] The ‘Lay Figure’, ‘Art notes: Miss Frances Hodgkins’s water-colours’, Dominion, 1 September 1913, p. 9. Quoted in Rebecca Rice, ‘Frances Hodgkins, The hilltop’, New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018), p. 93.
