Enjoying William Morris

Anarchy and beauty; William Morris and his legacy, 1860-1960
National Portrait Gallery, London
16 October 2014 – 11 January 2015

On the face of things, William Morris (1834-1896) doesn’t seem to have much of a profile in New Zealand. As a promoter of the arts and crafts movement, which, together with John Ruskin, he founded, he’s a reference, a distant source of an idea. His work as a poet, printer and a political activist, is pretty much ignored probably for the same vicarious reasons. His productions of textiles and furniture, as retailed through Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co (later Morris & Co), were with the odd exception (the book collector Alexander Turnbull being the notably odd exception) too expensive for the thrifty burghers of the colony and, with its socialist resonances, too devoid of imperial glory for the grandees of the dominion. While his romantic mediaeval-revival poetry and sagas found some passing New Zealand adherents in the early years of the twentieth century, they were known through cheap posthumous editions, not through the beautifully crafted editions from his Kelmscott Press; only Turnbull was financially enabled to collect those. Strangely enough, it was Morris' theorising about art that had impact in the colony, largely by its promulgation through an inadvertent process of colonialism: art education.

John Dearle for Morris & Co. Stained and painted glass window, 1910-1935.
Te Papa Tongarewa, purchased with the assistance of the Charles Disney Art Trust Fund, 2010 (GH020700)

A man who has prompted multiple biographies, Morris and his productions appear in most major collections of art and design although there aren't many of those in New Zealand. The tokenist holdings of Morris-related material in the Auckland Museum include a printed curtain, posthumously produced by Morris & Co and a 'Rossetti' chair, marketed by Morris & Co (both acquired in the 1980s). Te Papa's holdings include a stained glass window produced by Morris & Co and a sketch design by Dante Gabriel Rossetti for another Morris & Co window. Morris' designs have been the subject of numerous exhibitions around the world. In 2008 the Christchurch Art Gallery was the venue for Morris & Co: the world of William Morris assembled by the Art Gallery of South Australia, the one Antipodean institute with a significant holding of his work. The focus of these exhibitions has been on Morris’s work as a designer of textiles, furniture and private-press books and on his firm's retailing of carefully co-ordinated, expensively-produced, commodities for the well-upholstered interiors of the privileged classes.

The National Portrait Gallery in London is the – perhaps surprising – venue for the exhibition Anarchy and beauty; William Morris and his legacy, 1860-1960, curated by the independent historian Fiona MacCarthy, author of one of the more definitive recent biographies of Morris, William Morris: a life for our time (London : Faber, 1995).  Unlike its predecessor exhibitions Anarchy and beauty investigates the political dimension of Morris' design activities and the impact they had not only on his contemporaries but also on the subsequent generations of theorists, agitators, designers, planners, makers and retailers. Even with its British focus, the exhibition promotes an impressive genealogy, even if some of the more connective elements of the table are missing.

Where, for example, is that great implementer of Morris' ideology, Hubert Llewellyn Smith? Smith underwent a Damascene conversion to Morris' vision after attending a lecture 'Art and democracy' given by Morris, under the aegis of Ruskin, in the hall of University College, Oxford, in November 1883. He was so inspired that he became a Toynbee Hall pedagogue, a protégé of the Webbs, the effective founder of the Central School of Arts and Crafts (by way of his 1893 report on technical education for the London County Council), the founding secretary of the Labour Department of the Board of Trade and the patron of William Beveridge, the originator – in 1908 – of the Exhibitions Branch of the Board of Trade and hence a whole line of state-sponsored design promotional organisations up to today's neutered Design Council.

Walter Crane. Bookplate design for Alexander Turnbull, 1891.
Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand (A-136-001) 

So in this glorious rag bag of those influenced by Morris' ideology we get the designer Walter Crane (represented in the exhibition among other things by his design of the membership card of the Hammersmith Socialist Society) and the socialist poet, philosopher, anthologist and early LGBT activist Edward Carpenter (represented by his Indian-made sandals) ; the anarchist geographer and philosopher Prince Pyotr Kropotkin; the Suffragette painter Sylvia Pankhurst and the stained glass artist Mary Lowndes; the painter and potter William de Morgan and the silver designer, architect and pedagogue C R Ashbee (a magnificent silver peacock brooch he designed for his long-suffering wife); the priapic calligrapher and designer Eric Gill and Ebenezer Howard, the architect and planner who developed the idea of the garden city. Leaping well into the twentieth century we encounter the furniture and textile designers Robin and Lucien Day, the industrial designer Misha Black and, lastly and certainly not in his view leastly, the retailer Terence Conran. But, as the Guardian's Rachel Cooke observes, despite all this plenitude of names and associated objects, it's fundamentally all about 'Morris, the fat spider, who sits at the heart of the web constructed by the exhibition's curator, Fiona MacCarthy'. It's Morris' insistence on the availability to all of objects that are both utilitarian and beautiful and that the acquisition of manual skills is not only essential to a well-rounded life but also a life-enhancing political act. In Morris case, beauty was to be found in the relics of Mediaeval Europe, later adherents to his thinking found it elsewhere.

David Kindersley after a design by Eric Gill, 'Adam and Eve' garden roller, Portland stone and iron.
Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery)

It's in Ann Calhoun's impressively researched book The arts and crafts movement in New Zealand 1870-1940: women make their mark (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2000) that we are able to understand both the impact that Morris had in New Zealand and, in part, why this legacy has been so ignored by local historians of art and design.

Design and its relation with manufacturing was an issue that had been a concern of the British state long before Morris began delving into its roots. From the late 1830s, the British government began establishing Schools of Design around the country aimed primarily at improving the quality of design and thus of industrial production. By the 1850s responsibility for overseeing the curricula for these schools was controlled via the Department of Science and Art's South Kensington Museum. As Calhoun notes, Morris became an adviser to the South Kensington Museum in 1876 and was appointed an examiner, a position he retained until his death. In the absence of any local initiative, this British art training system was imported directly into New Zealand through the establishment of local art schools – with minimal government involvement – who employed not only graduates of the South Kensington National Art Training School but also its teaching methodologies and examinations. Given the non-existence of any significant manufacturing industry in the colony and thus an associated class of 'skilled artisans' the majority of those attending these schools tended to be women and the focus of their education tended to be domestic and/or appropriate for the teaching of primary school children; drawing was an required to be taught in New Zealand schools under the terms of the 1877 Education Act.

'British art section - arts and crafts', from Isidore Spielmann, The British government exhibit at the New Zealand International Exhibition 1906-1907 (London: HMSO, 1908), p. 243. The frieze circumventing the rooms was designed by Walter Crane

Arts and crafts productions did however receive considerable popular exposure and even some acclaim in 1906-07, at the New Zealand International Exhibition held in Christchurch, but these were British made, selected by Walter Crane in his capacity as president of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Crane's role didn't require him to visit visit New Zealand – he was represented at the exhibition by Alfred Appleby Longden – but he also designed the frieze used on the walls of the exhibit, although he'd executed it for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, held in St Louis in the United States. The inclusion of these arts and crafts pieces in the exhibition seems to have been the result of significant lobbying by Hubert Llewellyn Smith in his then capacity as acting permanent secretary of the British Board of Trade. They were an highly popular component of the exhibition: many pieces sold, 321 articles by 72 exhibitors. However, as Calhoun observes, the exhibit was 'very English' and a colonial hankering for reasonably-priced relics from 'home' may have accounted for the popularity of the pieces, few of which have been identified subsequently.

Effectively, by being stripped of its political dimension, gendered as a feminine concern and its promulgation confined to the genteel middle classes, Morris' noisy, rumbustious, socialist, all people and all classes, hands-on arts and crafts movement failed to flourish in colonial New Zealand. As Calhoun's text demonstrates, there were some enormously talented designers and makers, but the marginality of art and the absence of any viable market for their productions effectively put an end to any dream of living by their work.

Charles James Fox after a design by May Morris. Memorial case of gold-plated wood containing a locket of William Morris' hair, 1896-97
Victoria & Albert Museum

As Anarchy and beauty clearly demonstrates such was not to be Morris' British legacy. His socialism may have been overtaken by larger political events, but its core values remain a part of British political discourse. His furniture, textile and wallpaper productions may have been dismissed for much of the twentieth century as old-fashioned (Morris & Co finally closed in 1940) but the objects he designed and made, as indeed are those of his followers and adherents are highly sought after and many of the textiles and wallpapers remain in production. MacCarthy's intelligently structured, slyly witty (not the usual experience one imparts from a serious exhibition), brilliantly contextualised and beautifully selected exhibition shows the vitality of Morris' thinking and, indeed, its relevance to today. Appropriately, it's also well-designed and is accompanied by an equally rewarding catalogue. A must see, if you can get there.

Mangōpare modernism

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.

'Maori Art' bone china plate. Made by Doulton & Co, Burslem, England, about 1929

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). 

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

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. 

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.

Unidentified photographer, '[The British court at the New Zealand International Exhibition]', about 1906. While the overall quality of the British court was disappointing, the impressive Doulton stand was located at the rear of the court.
Christchurch City Libraries

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).

'Kia-Ora Ware' stoneware jardiniere. Made by Doulton & Co, Lambeth, England, about 1930.
Christie's

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.

Hugh & G K Neill, ' The Hall of Empire [in the British government pavilion at the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition, Dunedin, 1925-26]'.
G E Thomson, Official record of the New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition (Dunedin: Otago Master Printers' Association, [1926])

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.

Fleetway Press Ltd, 'New Zealand pavilion British Empire Exhibition 1924'.
The only identifiable New Zealand-sourced items in this postcard view of the façade of the pavilion are the cabbage tree/tī kōuka (Cordyline australis) and the flax/harakeke (Phormium tenax) in the foreground garden

Archives and design history

Memorandum from George Laurence Watkinson, an assistant secretary at the British Board of Trade, relating to the formation of the design promotion body that emerged as the Council of Industrial Design in December 1944. The last entry on the page was made by Alix Kilroy as the principal responsible for the initiative. Board of Trade papers at the National Archives of the United Kingdom (BT 64/3384)

Pretty much every week the Professional Historians' Association of New Zealand/Aotearoa emails its members with lists supplied by Archives New Zealand of those public documents intended for disposal under the terms of the Public Records Act 2005. These lists are distributed in order to garner comments from interested parties and to prevent egregious destruction. It’s a long way from the situation prevailing up to the beginning of the century which saw government departments and agencies disposing of archives without reference to anyone. In fact the New Zealand government’s approach to its archives has been extraordinarily negligent; the most appalling example occurring in 1952 when a fire in an annex of the Hope Gibbons Building in Wellington consumed the ‘early’ records of the Departments of Public Works, Lands and Survey, Labour, Agriculture and Marine.

This rat from about 1830, with a stomach full of chewed document, was used by Henry Cole in evidence of the poor condition of the records. National Archives of the United Kingdom, ref: E 163/24/31

Such a situation is far from unique. The shocking condition under which public records were preserved in the United Kingdom prompted the formation in 1836 of a parliamentary select committee to probe the affairs of the Records Commission, the body then charged with their care and maintenance. The report of the committee not only excoriated the commission but also led to the formation of the British Public Records Office and, not coincidentally, launched the stellar career of its author, Henry Cole, as 'the great bureaucrat' of nineteenth century industrial arts. But, despite these reforms, the destruction of official archives continued. In her memoir of her life as a civil servant in the British Board of Trade, Alix Meynell (née Kilroy) ­­– best remembered to history for her role in forming the Council of Industrial Design during the Second World War ­– recalled that as a new recruit she was put to sorting through her department’s files at the end of the 1920s and, without any guidelines or indexes, recommending their destruction, expressing the ‘fear that my simplistic advice may have been acted upon’ (Alix Meynell, Public servant, private woman (1988), p. 97).

If the public service was negligent about its records, then the private sector was often and inevitably worse. Business records, once their commercial usefulness had expired, were systemically trashed. And those that were retained were often stored under the worst of all possible conditions, well into the 1980s and 1990s. It is only recently that the value of these holdings has been recognised, but for all the wrong reasons. As the great manufacturing concerns have collapsed into bankruptcy, inevitably brought on by speculative buyouts and other financial ploys, their receivers have been seeking to realise every possible asset, particularly when company pension funds are involved. The example of the Wedgwood Museum in Barlaston, Staffordshire, which is currently making its way through the British legal system, is a case in point. The museum thought that, no matter the fate of its founding company, Josiah Wedgwood & Sons (which over the past decade absorbed Doulton & Co Ltd, which, in turn had absorbed Minton's Ltd), it was, as an independent trust, safe from depredation. The courts disagreed, interpreting the Pension Act 1995 as making the museum chargeable for the founding company’s pension indebtedness. As a result it's entirely possible that these collections and their associated remaining archives will be sent to Sotheby's in atonement for the sins of the speculators who had already trashed what they hadn't created.

 

Decorative metalwork awning designed and made by Wunderlich Limited for Farmer and Company Limited's department store in King Street, Sydney, New South Wales. E A Bradford, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 1920s. Photographic print from the Powerhouse Museum, Wunderlich Ltd Archive Collection, A7437-28/113

The shenanigans currently surrounding the Wedgwood Museum have their roots in the collapse of commodity manufacturing during the 1980s which affected companies around the world. In Australia, Wunderlich Ltd, inter alia, manufacturers of tiles and pressed ceiling panels, was closed by its owner, the Colonial Sugar Refinery Co Ltd (CSR) in 1979 and its Redfern factory abandoned. It was somewhat serendipitous that the firm’s closure coincided with a decision by the University of Sydney’s Department of Archaeology to launch a course in historical archaeology. Students from the course, together with curatorial staff from Sydney’s Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, undertook the colossal task of retrieving and preserving the company’s paper archives along with a significant tranche of moulds, pattern stamps, samples and the like. These are now held at the Powerhouse Museum and while not displayed are publicly accessible.

In New Zealand things have been no better. The archive of the pottery manufacturers Ambrico/Crown Lynn/Ceramco was quite literally abandoned when the company turned from being a ceramic manufactory into a speculative concern and closed its New Lynn factory. Much was retrieved thanks to the indefatigable work of the late Richard Quinn who collected files, reports, advertisements, production schedules and the like as the factory was demolished in 1989. After protracted and disputatious negotiations this material is now preserved by the Portage Ceramics Trust and in the library of the Auckland Museum.

But for all the archives that have been saved, a far greater proportion have been lost, often due to ignorance and a failure to understand the way that commodities are manufactured, distributed and mediated. Historically, greater significance has always been attributed to the role played by manufacturers, presumably on the basis that their place in the hierarchies of production was the most readily identifiable. But this attribution reflects a flawed way of looking at the processes of material culture history because it assumes both that manufacturers operate in an hermetic environment and that the manufacture of commodities is a one-way process from manufacturer to consumer, which, of course, they don’t and it isn’t.

A case in point can be made with the production of ceramics made for the New Zealand market by the British manufacturer Doulton & Co. The company was probably one of the most important suppliers of ceramic goods to New Zealand during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: in the 1860s its stoneware sewer pipes (made at its Lambeth factory) were specified by the richer New Zealand municipalities and, from the mid 1880s, the company became one of the leading suppliers of table and ornamental wares (made both at Lambeth and its newly acquired  Stoke-on-Trent works) to New Zealand consumers.  The man primarily responsible for this market capture was Doulton’s agent in Sydney, John Shorter (1853-1942) who, from the mid 1890s, was responsible for the New Zealand market.

John Shorter about 1930 

Shorter, who was Staffordshire born, was sent out by Doulton & Co to install its display at the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition. One of Shorter’s more interesting ways of activating the high end of the local market – one that was emulated by any number of British ceramic manufacturers – was to send paintings of local flora (Miss Ada Rutherford of Bathurst was his favoured supplier of designs) to be copied onto standard forms by china painters in the Doulton factories. This initiative developed from Shorter’s collaboration with Richard Baker, curator of the Sydney Technological Museum, who adhered to an idea first proposed by the ex-Communard painter Lucien Henry that ‘a national art form’ must develop out of the applied arts and that the best way of achieving this was to seek inspiration in nature.

New Zealand 1d postage stamp commemorating the New Zealand Exhibition of Arts and Industries from 1906. The first commemorative issue and the first to be entirely designed, engraved and printed in New Zealand

Shorter followed the same rationale in preparing Doulton’s exhibit at the 1906-07 Christchurch New Zealand International Exhibition of Arts and Industries. But for this occasion he picked up on one of the theme of  the exhibition, its presentation of what might be described as ‘Māoriness’, a Pākehā vision of a Māori culture that was at once patronising, demeaning and inaccurate, but entirely consistent with the prevailing treatment of non-European cultures at international exhibitions. It seems that on Shorter’s direction, Doulton produced two lines for the exhibition - alongside a range of cheaper souvenir wares: ‘Māori Art’ and ‘Māori Ware’. The former design was based on an illustration in Augustus Hamilton’s 1897 Māori Art of kōwhaiwhai collected by HW Williams in the east of the North Island during the early 1890s.

Transfer-printed and painted porcelain dinner plate 
from the Doulton ‘Māori Art’ service, designed about 1906

Verso of the plate. Impressed marks indicate
the blank was produced in 1928

But this Australian connection has been lost from the received history of design in New Zealand. In 1979, nearly three quarters of a century after the design was conceived, John Shorter Pty Ltd lost the Doulton agency and in 1982 John Shorter’s grandson, another John Shorter died and the company ceased its trade in ceramics. The significance of the company’s archive was not recognised and, like the greater part of the Doulton archive in England, it was destroyed. The consequence of this absence of documentation has prompted a number of myths relating to the ‘Māori Art’ design: the general editor of Te Ara, the official encyclopedia of New Zealand, Jock Phillips, has asserted that it was designed in the 1920s. And in his biography of Āpirana Ngata, Ranginui Walker states that the pattern was ‘commissioned to be made in England’ by Ngata and that it was ‘a cultural statement that Māori decorative art and design had a place in the modern world’ (Ranginui Walker, He tipua: the life and times of Sir Āpirana Ngata (2001), p. 165).

It was indeed a cultural statement; but while Ngata may have ordered a ‘Māori Art’ service and it was appropriately decorated with a design possibly based on a Ngāti Porou kōwhaiwhai - Ngata belonged to that iwi confederation - the statement was most probably made by an Australian-domiciled Englishman; it was a statement of colonialism. Unfortunately, as a result of the destruction of the relevant archives, we will probably never know for certain if the application of the design was the harbinger of a cultural shift or the result of commercial pragmatism.