JOHN BARR CLARK HOYTE (1835-1913)
Mount Arthur / Tuao Wharepapa (1,795 m- 5,889 ft)
New Zealand (South Island)
In Mt Arhur New Zealand, watercolour, 1877
The mountain
Mount Arthur / Tuao Wharepapa (1,795m- 5,889ft) is in the Arthur Range in the north western area of the South Island of New Zealand, within Kahurangi National Park. Mount Arthur is named after Captain Arthur Wakefield. Mt Arthur is made of hard, crystalline marble, transformed from limestone, originally laid down under the sea some 450 million years ago. Below ground are some of the deepest shafts and most intricate cave systems in the country, and exploration of these is far from finished. Mount Arthur is home to the Ellis Basin cave system, the deepest cave in the Southern Hemisphere, and Nettlebed Cave which was thought to be the deepest cave system the Southern Hemisphere prior to discovery of the Ellis Basin cave system in 2010. During the ice ages small glaciers carved smooth basins called 'cirques' high on Mt Arthur, polishing and scraping the tough marble. The floors of the cirques are studded with sinkholes where surface water is taken underground into extensive cave systems.
The painter
John Barr Clark Hoyte was born in England, probably in London, the son of Samuel Hoyte, a landowner. His mother's name is not known, nor are any details of his childhood. From 1856 to 1859 he was employed as a planter in Demerara, Guyana, after which he returned to England. On 1860, at Leamington, Warwickshire, he married Rose Esther Elizabeth Parsons, daughter of an iron merchant. Within three months they sailed on the Egmont for Auckland, New Zealand, where they were to live for 16 years. Three daughters were born in Auckland, and the couple may also have had a son. A brother of John Hoyte emigrated to New Zealand, possibly in the 1870s.
Nothing is known of Hoyte's education and artistic training and we are reduced to the obvious deduction that he was heir to the English tradition of topographic draughtsmanship and watercolour painting. Firm drawing underlies his landscapes, making it appropriate to group him with colonial surveyor–architect artists such as Edward Ashworth, Edmund Norman and George O'Brien.
During his years in New Zealand John Hoyte travelled assiduously in search of new scenes to exploit. In January 1866 he exhibited views from Whangarei, Coromandel, Auckland, Waikato, the Wellington region and Nelson, although some of these pictures were not painted from the subject. In the 1870s he travelled each summer, progressively adding the thermal region, Taranaki, Nelson, Christchurch, Arthur's Pass, Banks Peninsula and Otago to his repertoire between 1872 and 1876.
His pictorial exploration of the colony's principal dramatic landscapes was completed when he took a cruise circumnavigating the South Island in early 1877, exploring the coast of Fiordland with particular attention. New Zealand subjects would continue to inspire his production long after he had settled in Australia, where they shared his attention with coastal and mountain views drawn chiefly from the neighbourhood of Sydney.
The success of the art unions of his work shows that the subjects he painted were in harmony with public taste. Despite the exceptional landscapes which appear so frequently in his production – geysers, the Pink and White Terraces, fiords, mountains and lakes – it appears that his preference was for a more gentle, picturesque mode of landscape art rather than the heightened tensions of the sublime. The Otago Guardian in 1876 described 'the aspect of repose which usually characterises Mr Hoyte's illustrations of native landscapes'. A comparison of Fiordland subjects painted by Hoyte and John Gully shows that Hoyte eschewed the manipulation of the viewer's emotions which the latter exploited so regularly. Even in his pastoral subjects Gully could be relied on to introduce an epic element which Hoyte usually avoided. Despite his apparent commercial success, however, Hoyte's standing, like that of George O'Brien, waned in the 1870s: a decade which marked a major shift in New Zealand colonial taste as the Turnerian Romantics such as Gully, J. C. Richmond and W. M. Hodgkins moved into greater prominence. They and their style were to dominate the following decades.