In 2009 the British Museum's Department of Prehistory and Europe purchased at the Alexandra Palace Antique and Collectors Fair in London an earthenware plate decorated
with a coloured transfer-printed kōwhaiwhai (painted
rafter decoration) border. This ‘Maori Art’ plate was fabricated at the
Lambeth factory of the British ceramic manufacturer Doulton & Co in about
1925.
It is currently on show at the museum in a display devoted to the emergence
of modernism in Europe. Surrounded by the work of George Walton, Josef Olbrich,
Henri van de Velde, Mikhael Adamovich and Marianne Brandt, the plate’s abstract design seems to have been deployed by the museum to exemplify the art historical trope that links the
‘primitive’ to the modern. The positioning of this apparently anonymously designed plate amongst these modernist archetypes seems to resonate with Evan Kindley's recent observation in the London Review of Books, that there's a fear amongst historians that they 'will slip into the comfortable grooves of "great man" narratives - a tendency to which scholars of modernism, always a congress of cults of personality, are particularly prone.'
Accompanying the plate is a label that, even accounting
for the constraints imposed by its function and format, is not only notable for
the absence of accurate information concerning the plate’s design, production
and consumption but also for the revisionist perpective it provides on contemporary British
views of the relationship that existed between between the colonising power and
its colonial subjects. The label reads
as follows:
Earthenware plate with ‘Maori’
pattern
English, made by Doulton Pottery,
Lambeth, London,
about 1925
Doulton’s first Maori designs were
made for the 1906 New Zealand International Exhibition in Christchurch. This
plate was made for the Dunedin Exhibition of 1925. The patterns based on those
of a Maori meeting house (see room 24) may have been inspired by the decoration
of the New Zealand pavilion at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley in
1924.
The British Museum’s plate isn’t the first example of
Doulton’s ‘Maori Art’ ware to enter a British collection: the Fitzwilliam
Museum in Cambridge has a bone china cup and saucer exhibiting the same pattern,
fabricated at Doulton & Co’s Burslem factory about 1930, which it
acquired by donation in 1993. While the Fitzwilliam’s on-line catalogue description again
fails to describe the pattern accurately or to acknowledge its source, it does
suggest that the pattern pre-dates the ‘decoration of the New Zealand pavilion
at the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley’ by at least twenty odd years.
As has been previously observed on this blog, the design of the ‘Maori Art’ pattern was based on an illustration
that reproduced twenty-nine kōwhaiwhai collected by the Anglican bishop Herbert
Williams to accompany his chapter ‘Description of Maori rafter patterns’
published in Augustus Hamilton’s Māori Art (Dunedin: Ferguson and Mitchell for the New Zealand Institute, 1897).
The Doulton pattern design most closely matches Williams' rafter pattern no. 25, Mangōpare
(hammerhead shark), which he identified as coming from the wharenui named
Tamatekapua (constructed in 1878) of the Ngāti Whakaue
subtribes Ngāti Tae-o-Tū and Ngāti Tūnohopū, of the Te
Arawa descent, at the Te Papaiouru Marae near Ōhinemutu.
Albert Percy Godber, [Photograph of Māori rafter patterns 22-26 from Augustus Hamilton, Maori art'], 1916. National Library of New Zealand, reference no. APG-0586-1/2-G |
John Dobree Pascoe, 'Kōwhaiwhai on the rafters of Tamatekapua meeting
house at Ohinemutu', [about 1940] National Library of New Zealand, reference no. 1/4-001700-F |
It is unclear how the Mangōpare
design came to the attention of the art department at Doulton & Co’s
Burslem factory, who were most probably responsible for producing the transfer
plate used for the production of the first wares –
in bone china – that carried the pattern. However, confusingly, the British
Museum on-line catalogue description, presumably on the basis of information
recorded in the 1909 registration of the design (537842), identifies the pattern
as being the result of a collaboration between the Doulton Lambeth factory artist
Francis Pope and its art director Joseph Mott.
Speculatively, Doulton's 'Maori Art' line may have resulted from an order placed by John
Shorter, their Australasian agent. Resident in Australia since 1878,
the Staffordshire-born Shorter, during the 1890s, became involved in the
efforts of Richard T Baker,
a graduate of the South Kensington Museum design training scheme and curator of the
Technological Museum in Sydney, to promote the use of specifically Australian iconography
in manufactured commodities destined for the Australian market. The idiom
identified by Baker as being uniquely ‘Australian’ was its flora; Shorter’s embrace
of the 'Australian flora in art' cause focused on the upper end of the market and included boldly painted
porcelain and earthenware vases and plates.
Doulton was not unique in its efforts to employ
Australian iconography on products specifically identified for the local
market. Other British manufacturers, such as Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, also
produced Australian lines, although not so exclusively and not so visually effective. Wedgwood, for example, produced from around 1882 a cream-coloured
earthenware ‘Australian flora’ range decorated with painted transfer prints
probably derived from botanical monographs. The qualitative difference between the productions of the two British companies seems to lie in the work of an exiled French Communard painter Lucien Henry, resident in Sydney from the late 1880s until his death in 1896. Whether he realised his role or not, the Beaux Arts trained Henry effectively reconfigured visual perspectives of colonial markets; from the documentary to the aesthetic.
From the 1840s until the early 1980s, British ceramic
manufacturers dominated the New Zealand tableware market. Their goods entered
the country under preferential trade tariffs that subjected non-British
competitors to a range of swingeing taxes and duties. They also had an
unrivalled network of local agents, but, most significantly, it was their close
relationship with the London-based distribution firms who, until the advent of
readily available illustrated media, controlled the British export market and, effectively,
determined what New Zealand consumers knew about and purchased.
This cartel-like network was reinforced during the
three major exhibitions held in the country between 1865 and 1925 which
included representative displays from a number of major British ceramic manufacturers, under either their own name or that of selected retailers. At the 1865 New Zealand
Exhibition held in Dunedin, Doulton & Watts, the predecessor of Doulton
& Co, exhibited under its own name while Josiah Wedgwood & Sons was
represented by the Bond Street ceramic retailers William P and George Phillips;
Pinder Bourne, the predecessor company of what became Doulton & Co’s
Burslem plant, were shown by a local agent, M Calvert of Dunedin.
The 1906-07 New Zealand International Exhibition held in
Christchurch again saw British firms dominating the commercial displays of
ceramics either in their own right or under the aegis of local agents.
Doulton exhibited both in the British government's fine arts pavilion and in the commercial court; its wares forming a significant component of the display put together by a
local retailer, John Bates & Co. James Cowan, editor of the exhibition record, declared in awed tones that the Doulton display was ‘the finest of all […] some
of these masterpieces of the designer’s and potter’s arts, were priced as high
as £500 each ($78,424 in today’s terms).’ (J Cowan, Official record of the New Zealand International Exhibition of arts and
industries, held at Christchurch, 1906-7 (Wellington: Government Printer,
1910), p. 299).
Doulton & Co appear to have produced two lines specifically for the
exhibition: ‘Maori Ware’ and ‘Maori Art’. ‘Maori Ware’, later re-labelled
‘Kia-Ora Ware’, was produced in salt-glazed stoneware at the Lambeth factory, notwithstanding the Auckland Museum's erroneous identification of it it as being produced in Burslem.
Its decoration – which resembles more closely the work of Joseph Mott -
consists of a series of contrastingly coloured reliefs, loosely based on Māori
carving. ‘Maori Art’, by contrast, reproduced kōwhaiwhai with a degree of accuracy and was produced initially
in bone china at Burslem.
Unidentified photographer, 'Hongi at the inner pā at the New Zealand International Exhibition, Christchurch', [1906-07]. National Library of New Zealand, reference no. 1/1-022026-G |
Doulton’s decision to deploy Māori-derived designs for its
Christchurch display conformed to a wider cultural agenda. From the first of the great
international exhibitions, the 1851 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry
of all Nations, British colonial authorities and, later, New Zealand settler governments employed Māori cultural artefacts not only
to promote the colony as a destination for immigration and, later, tourism but
also to emphasise the country's difference from other outposts of empire. From the 1879
Sydney International Exhibition until the 1924-25 British Empire Exhibition, the
scale of these displays of the taonga of ‘subjugated’ Māori expanded to include
wharenui. Inspired by displays of colonised people at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, a decision was
made at the Christchurch exhibition to supplement a contrived display of indigenous material culture with Māori
themselves. (B Kernot, ‘Māoriland metaphors and the model pā’, in Farewell colonialism: the New Zealand International Exhibition
Christchurch, 1906-07, ed. by J M Thomson (Palmerston North: Dunmore,
1998), 61-78.) For Pākehā, Māori presence and symbolism at the exhibition served settler
need for a unique identity and iterated a sense of hegemony over
what was perceived of as a ‘dying race’. By appropriating the iconography of a culture that was not their own, the Doulton wares reinforced that Galtonian view.
The British Museum’s earthenware plate was apparently produced for the New Zealand and
South Seas International Exhibition held at Dunedin in 1925-26. The preeminent focus of
the exhibition was the British government pavilion, organised by the British
Department of Overseas Trade and the Federation of British Industry, both organisations legacies of pre-war Board of Trade attempts to reform British industry. It
included: a ‘Hall of Empire’; an ‘Historical Relics Gallery, which included costume
and electrotype reproductions of historical silver from the Victoria and Albert
Museum, archaeological relics from the Guildhall Museum and models of British
cathedrals lent by the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury Cathedral; Naval, Army and Air Force galleries; and
an ‘Industrial Art Gallery’ organised by yet another Board of Trade initiative, the British Institute of Industrial
Art.
The over-riding sense conveyed by the exhibition generally was one of imperial recycling and Doulton
& Co, rebranded in 1922 as ‘Royal Doulton’, entered into this zeitgeist by using the Dunedin exhibition to launch recycled Māori patterned wares: ‘Maori
Art’, produced in earthenware at the failing Lambeth factory, was given a
fashionable, buttery yellow ground. Contrary to the claims of the
British Museum label, if any display in the New Zealand pavilion at the 1924-25
British Empire Exhibition at Wembley influenced the design of Doulton products it was
probably the colour of its ‘reasonably decent show of butter and cheese’, rather than its tokenist displays of decontextualised and misappropriated Māori art.