Rebecca Rice
Dr Rebecca Rice is Curator Historical Art at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. She has a particular research focus on colonial New Zealand art and regularly researches, curates and publishes in this field. Recent publications include ‘From Aide-memoire to Public Memorial: The ‘Gordon Collection’ of Photographic Portraits Relating to the New Zealand Wars’, New Zealand Journal of History, (2018) and Unsettling: Art and the New Zealand Wars, Art History, Victoria University of Wellington (2016). She has contributed to Te Papa’s collection-based publications, New Zealand Art at Te Papa (2019) and Ten x Ten: Art at Te Papa (2017), in which she has sought to increase the representation of nineteenth-century female artists. Rebecca curated the award-winning exhibition Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality and was editor of the accompanying catalogue. She co-curated Rā Maumahara | New Zealand Wars (2017), Ngā Tae Whakarongorua | Encounters (2018) and Tamatea: HeTūtakinga Tuku Iho | Legacies of Encounter (2019) and Featon’s Flowers (2019).
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Papers by Rebecca Rice
In this paper I explore the role The Spirit of Christianity, and other British paintings that toured to Australasia, were expected to play in the education and civilisation of exhibition visitors. In particular, this article will consider the role of colonial taste, and what the reception of Watts’s painting might tell us about the understanding of “High Art” by the “enlightened” versus the “common” colonist.
sciences in colonial New Zealand, as the native flora of this place
was collected, analysed, identified and classified. While males
dominated the professional world of knowledge production in the
recently established field of ‘serious’ scientific botany, the amateur
field was populated by highly talented females, including
Georgina Hetley and Sarah Featon.
James Hector, first Director of Wellington’s Colonial Museum,
was a keen botanist, and regularly communicated with ’My dear
Hooker’, Joseph Dalton Hooker of Kew Gardens. Hector supported
several scientific publications by males in the 1870s and 80s, yet
his lack of support for locally produced works by females is notable.
This paper investigates the networks that both supported and
restricted female activity in this field. It will consider the
contributions of female practitioners, highlighting that the life of a
‘flower painter’ occupied a liminal realm – never fully at home
either in the world of science, or of art. It will imagine how
different these women’s lives and careers may have been if they
had been privileged to communicate with ’My dear Hooker’ and
to receive letters addressed in turn to, for example, ’My dear Hetley’.
Books by Rebecca Rice
This chapter examines what these exhibitions tell us about the nature of progress made in New Zealand art between 1865 and 1889. For in spite of the country’s marginal position and relative youth, both exhibition boasted fine arts courts featuring works by both colonial and international artists. Further, the critical response to the New Zealand art displayed at the two exhibitions shows a distinct development and a shift in tone from congratulation to criticism. This chapter argues that the 1865 exhibition had provided a boost for the development of arts infrastructure in New Zealand. By 1889, this infrastructure was well-developed and was having an impact on the artistic products of the colony. Yet this institutional progress ushered in more anxiety than triumphalism. The critics in 1889 questioned rather than celebrated New Zealand’s artistic progress. They exhibited a new historical consciousness that the ‘colonial’ moment was past and an anxiety about the next, untested phase of national development in the fine arts.
A comparison of the art on show at the 1865 and 1889 exhibitions staged in Dunedin provides the opportunity to evaluate the shifting critical responses and to reflect upon the ‘progress’ of New Zealand art as it reached its sesquicentenary.
In this paper I explore the role The Spirit of Christianity, and other British paintings that toured to Australasia, were expected to play in the education and civilisation of exhibition visitors. In particular, this article will consider the role of colonial taste, and what the reception of Watts’s painting might tell us about the understanding of “High Art” by the “enlightened” versus the “common” colonist.
sciences in colonial New Zealand, as the native flora of this place
was collected, analysed, identified and classified. While males
dominated the professional world of knowledge production in the
recently established field of ‘serious’ scientific botany, the amateur
field was populated by highly talented females, including
Georgina Hetley and Sarah Featon.
James Hector, first Director of Wellington’s Colonial Museum,
was a keen botanist, and regularly communicated with ’My dear
Hooker’, Joseph Dalton Hooker of Kew Gardens. Hector supported
several scientific publications by males in the 1870s and 80s, yet
his lack of support for locally produced works by females is notable.
This paper investigates the networks that both supported and
restricted female activity in this field. It will consider the
contributions of female practitioners, highlighting that the life of a
‘flower painter’ occupied a liminal realm – never fully at home
either in the world of science, or of art. It will imagine how
different these women’s lives and careers may have been if they
had been privileged to communicate with ’My dear Hooker’ and
to receive letters addressed in turn to, for example, ’My dear Hetley’.
This chapter examines what these exhibitions tell us about the nature of progress made in New Zealand art between 1865 and 1889. For in spite of the country’s marginal position and relative youth, both exhibition boasted fine arts courts featuring works by both colonial and international artists. Further, the critical response to the New Zealand art displayed at the two exhibitions shows a distinct development and a shift in tone from congratulation to criticism. This chapter argues that the 1865 exhibition had provided a boost for the development of arts infrastructure in New Zealand. By 1889, this infrastructure was well-developed and was having an impact on the artistic products of the colony. Yet this institutional progress ushered in more anxiety than triumphalism. The critics in 1889 questioned rather than celebrated New Zealand’s artistic progress. They exhibited a new historical consciousness that the ‘colonial’ moment was past and an anxiety about the next, untested phase of national development in the fine arts.
A comparison of the art on show at the 1865 and 1889 exhibitions staged in Dunedin provides the opportunity to evaluate the shifting critical responses and to reflect upon the ‘progress’ of New Zealand art as it reached its sesquicentenary.