Painting like the nineteenth-century ‘globe-trotteress’ Constance Gordon-Cumming

In 2025, Te Papa acquired four watercolours by the nineteenth-century British artist Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming (1837–1924). Over summer, art history lecturer Dr Victoria Munn, and student and artist, Catherine Shone, brought new light to bear on Gordon-Cumming’s artistic practice and process.

Who was Constance Gordon-Cumming?

Constance Gordon-Cumming (1837–1924) was a Scottish-born writer and artist. She was described by her contemporary, English writer William Henry Davenport Adams, as having ‘put a girdle about the world with unfailing ardour.’[i] Little is known about Gordon-Cumming’s education or training, but, having grown up in an artistic upper-class household, she was exhibiting works at the Royal Academy of Scotland and the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts by the 1860s.

Gordon-Cumming’s love of travel was sparked when she visited her sister in India in 1868, followed by expeditions in Asia, America and the South Pacific. She represents a group of women, referred to in their day as “globe trotteresses”, who undertook extensive travel in the nineteenth century, many of whom engaged with faraway lands by sketching and painting scenes they encountered or writing accounts of their travels. Indeed, Gordon-Cumming produced lively and detailed paintings of the landscapes she encountered across the world and, upon her return to Scotland in the early 1880s, she published several travel books recounting her experiences.^[ii]

In the South Pacific

After extensive travels in India and Ceylon, Gordon-Cumming spent several years in the South Pacific. In 1875, she accompanied the first British Governor of Fiji, Sir Arthur Gordon and his wife, Rachel Hamilton Gordon, on a trip from England to Fiji and spent the following year travelling around the Fijian islands. Gordon-Cumming then spent the first few months of 1877 in New Zealand, travelling to Kawau Island, the Coromandel, Rotorua, Wairoa, and Auckland.

Her time in Fiji and New Zealand is recounted in detail in one of her published travel accounts, At Home in Fiji (1881), and some of the paintings Gordon-Cumming produced of New Zealand scenery are held in the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Gordon-Cumming was then invited aboard a French man-of-war that was travelling around the South Pacific at the service of the Bishop of Sāmoa. She visited Tonga, Sāmoa and Tahiti, and again her experiences and observations were recorded in print and in paint.^[iii] Two of Te Papa’s recently acquired watercolours, painted by Gordon-Cumming in late 1877, depict the South Pacific island of Mo‘orea.

Studying Constance Gordon-Cumming

Given her travels in New Zealand and the South Pacific and impressive resulting watercolours, Constance Gordon-Cumming featured as a case study in the Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington Art History course, ‘Topic in Aotearoa New Zealand Art: Women and Art, c. 1880–1940’. The course was developed and taught by the 2025 Oroya and Melvin Day Fellow in New Zealand Art History, Dr Victoria Munn.

The course positioned women at the centre of New Zealand’s art history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In response to the lesser amount of critical scholarship about historical women artists in New Zealand, the course focused on developing students’ primary research skills and showcasing new ways to approach understudied aspects of New Zealand art history.

Victoria encouraged students to undertake their own archival research, incorporating visits to Tapuaka (the University’s Heritage and Archives Collection) and the Alexander Turnbull Library. A class trip to Te Papa’s art stores and engagement with the University’s own art collection also facilitated in-person interactions with artworks by women artists. Students were encouraged to find new ways to approach course material and artworks such as paintings, photographs and textiles.

A student’s response

Undergraduate Art History student Catherine Shone embraced the challenge. A practising visual artist, Catherine was drawn to Constance Gordon-Cumming’s combination of transparent washes of colour and meticulous detail, creating vibrant landscapes for the viewer to journey through. Given the limited published scholarship on Gordon-Cumming’s painting practice, for her research essay, Catherine instead turned to primary sources such as nineteenth-century artists’ manuals, modern pigment composition research, and experimental practice, to better understand the artistic processes and materials Gordon-Cumming used while visiting – and painting – the South Pacific.

Thanks to Te Papa’s paper conservator Louise Newdick and collection manager Andrea Hearfield, an extra-curricular trip to Te Papa’s conservation lab also gave Catherine the opportunity to inspect Gordon-Cumming’s watercolours more closely.

Gordon-Cumming’s technique

Gordon-Cumming’s 1904 autobiography, Memories, provided invaluable first-hand evidence of her painting technique and made clear to Catherine the demands Gordon-Cumming must have experienced when painting in the Pacific. Gordon-Cumming boasts completing “upwards of a hundred very interesting large pictures” on a yearlong journey across India—an output only possible through a confident, highly disciplined method. She also describes beginning with precise pencil outlines before laying in colour at speed.^[iv]

Gordon-Cumming’s fellow South Pacific traveller, British explorer Alfred Maudslay, noticed the pace and regularity of her practice, recalling watching her paint in Fiji and marvelling at the “wonderful rapidity and accuracy” of her outlines. Maudsley admired Gordon-Cumming’s pictures when they were “three parts done”, but regretted the loss of immediacy when she later finished them at home.^[v] His account aligns closely with the painting process Gordon-Cumming herself describes, where swift, gestural work executed en plein air formed the foundation for slower, more refined detail added indoors.

Catherine noticed evidence of this method in Mount Rotui, Cook’s Bay (Pao Pao) and Opunoku Bay, Moorea, in which layered washes of colour, rendered with unblended brush strokes, are enough to suggest the rise and fall of the golden Mo’orean hills. Working on a smaller scale, Catherine reenacted Gordon-Cumming’s approach, showing just how quickly it could establish an entire scene. Transparent washes set the structure of light, tone, and perspective in less than an hour. Gordon-Cumming could feasibly have completed several layers outdoors.

Catherine then focused on recreating a specific passage of Gordon-Cumming’s landscape: a grove of trees on the right-hand side of the composition that winds its way back towards the shoreline. She quickly realised details such as the figures and the darker, more densely worked greens of the mid-ground bush demanded tighter brushwork and more focused attention and thus lent themselves to indoor completion. Imitating some of Gordon-Cumming’s impressively minute detail, especially the figures, Catherine required the finest brush with an incredibly steady hand.

Gordon-Cumming’s materials

Recreating the passage of bush in Mount Rotui, Cook’s Bay (Pao Pao) and Opunoku Bay, Moorea also helped Catherine to better understand Gordon-Cumming’s materials. When inspecting the work in Te Papa’s conservation lab, Catherine noticed several distinct colour mixtures within the foliage, where the greens suggest that more than one blue or yellow pigment had been used.

Thus choosing her pigments, Catherine followed guidance outlined in the 1870 instruction manual Sketching from Nature in Watercolours, which instructs artists to paint foliage with a combination of gamboge yellow, red lake (cochineal), indigo blue and cobalt blue.^[vi] The manual directs the artist to mix these pigments ‘as the character of the tones may require’, adjusting the pigments’ ratios as necessary, but importantly suggests an increased use of the cooler cobalt to transform the warm foreground greens into cooler middle distance tones. Adopting this technique, Catherine was pleased with the sense of depth she was able to achieve.

Fading pigments or an artist adapting to environment?

Catherine noticed, however, that her painting was much less yellow than the Gordon-Cumming paintings she inspected, and considered whether this might be attributed to the vulnerability of watercolour paint. A particularly light-sensitive medium, works painted with watercolour—which was popular among nineteenth-century women artists—are vulnerable to fading or change over time. This means many works by historic women artists in Te Papa’s collection have curatorial limitations, requiring substantial periods of ‘rest’ time after their display. And although British artists in the mid-to-late nineteenth century began using exciting new synthetic pigments, many pigments in circulation were still made from organic, fugitive materials that would have changed or faded.^[vii]

This might have explained the yellowish tones Catherine observed in Gordon-Cumming’s paintings: an unstable component in the greens she mixed had discoloured over time. Perhaps she used indigo, a pigment known to be unstable, rather than the remarkably lightfast and resilient cobalt blue, which remains strikingly vibrant in Gordon-Cumming’s depictions of sea and sky. However, recent research shows that indigo mixed with gamboge yellow tends to fade toward blue or blue‑green, not the warm yellowing seen in many of Gordon-Cumming’s landscapes.^[viii] This points to a different explanation: perhaps Gordon-Cumming relied on yellow ochre, a far more stable pigment, to build her greens. Catherine thus surmised that Gordon-Cumming’s greens grew increasingly complex in response to the South Pacific light, revealing an artist mixing in response to what she saw rather than relying on the standard formulas of her time.

By bringing together archival research, close looking, and artistic experimentation, Victoria and Catherine have shed new light on Gordon-Cumming’s artistic practice.

References

[i] W.H. Davenport Adams, Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century (London: Sonneschein, 1883), 444.

^[ii] See for example Constance Gordon-Cumming, At Home in Fiji (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1881); Constance Gordon Cumming, Memories (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1904).

^[iii] Constance Gordon-Cumming, A Lady’s Cruise in a French Man-of-War (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1882).

^[iv] Gordon-Cumming, Memories, 199.

^[v] Alfred Maudslay, Life in the Pacific (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1930), 85.

^[vi] Aaron Penley, Sketching from Nature in Watercolours (London: Cassell, Petter, Galpin & Co., 1870), 12.

^[vii] Adrian Abel, “The history of dyes and pigments: From natural dyes to high performance pigments”, in Colour Design, 2nd ed., ed. Janet Best (Woodhead Publishing, 2012), 581.

^[viii] Marisa A. Choffel et al., “Revealing the Fugitive Palette of the Early American South: A SERS Study of Eighteenth-Century Oil Paintings” Studies in Conservation 67, no. 8, (2022): 565, https://doi.org/10.1080/00393630.2021.1961391.

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