KUNANYI / MOUNT WELLINGTON PAR AUGUSTUS EARLE

 

AUGUSTUS EARLE (1793-1838)
Mont Wellington / Kunanyi (1,271 m - 4,170 ft),
Australie (Tasmanie)

In Tasmania - Van Dieman's Island, gravure sur papier, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

 
La montagne
Le mont Wellington (1,271 m - 4,170 ft), dont le nom officiel depuis 2013 est Kunanyi, est un sommet de l'ile e Tasmanie en Australie situé en surplomb de la ville de Hobart. Il est très souvent appelé tout simplement « la montagne » (the Mountain) par les habitants d'Hobart. Fréquemment recouvert de neige, même q en été, la partie basse de ses versants est constituée d'épaisses forêts traversées par de nombreux chemins de randonnées ou des zones déboisées par des feux de forêts. Il existe une étroite route goudronnée longue de 22 km qui mène au sommet. Un refuge couvert et fermé permet d'avoir une vue sur la ville et vers l'est sur l'estuaire de la Derwent River et d"apercevoir au loin, à 100 km vers l'ouest les parcs nationaux de Tasmanie classés au Patrimoine Mondial de l'Humanité. A partir de  Hobart, la caractéristique principale du Mt. Wellington est de présenter une  falaise de colonnes de dolérite appelées les « tuyaux d'orgues » (the Organ Pipes).

 Le peintre
Augustus Earle était un peintre britannique. Contrairement aux artistes qui travaillaient hors d' Europe pour couvrir les voyages d'exploration  en tant que peintre-explorateur ou a ceux qui travaillaient à l'étranger pour de riches mécènes aristocratiques, Earle pu avoir toute sa vie durant  une large  autonomie, qui lui permit de capable de combiner son désir de voyager avec une capacité à gagner sa vie grâce à son art. L'ensemble des travaux qu'il a produits au cours de ses voyages constitue aujourd'hui un important dossier documentaire sur les contact et la colonisation européennes au début du XIXe siècle.  Il voyagea ainsi d'abord en Méditerranée avec la Royal Navy et en ramena un carnet tres fourni de dessins de Sicile, Malte, Gibraltar et l'Afrique du Nord, conservé à la  National Gallery of Australia à Canberra. Puis il embarque pour un voyage qui lui fit le tour du monde en passant par l'Amérique du Nord, New York et Philadelphie notamment avant de se rendre en Amérique du Sud  ou il visita le Brésil, le Chili et le Pérou.  Le 17 février 1824, il quitte Rio de Janeiro à bord du navire vieillissant Duke of Gloucester à destination du cap de Bonne-Espérance, puis  Calcutta,mais le navire fait naufrage et on retrouve notre Augustus Earle rescapé sur l'ile isolée de Tristan da Cunha, qu'aucun artiste avant lui  n 'avait jamais peinte !  Finalement il se rend en Australie ou il arrive en 1856 par la Tasmanie, ce qui fait de l'aquarelle présente ici, une de ses premières œuvres australiennes. Il se rendit par la suite en Nouvelle  Zélande, en Inde, à Pondichery, à Singapour, à Manille, Guam, et dans les  iles Carolines,   En octobre 1831, il fut engagé par le capitaine Robert FitzRoy comme artiste surnuméraire avec des vivres lors du deuxième voyage du HMS Beagle , travaillant comme dessinateur topographique. Il se lia alors  d'amitié avec Charles Darwin et, en avril et mai 1832, ils séjournent ensemble dans un cottage à Botafogo près de Rio de Janeiro. Cependant es problèmes de santé l'obligèrent  à retourner en Angleterre.

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2022 - Wandering Vertexes ....
            Errant au-dessus des Sommets Silencieux...
            Un blog de Francis Rousseau

MOUNT EARNSLAW / PIKIRAKATAHI BY JOHN TURNBULL THOMSON

EDWYN TEMPLE (1835-1921)

Mount Earnslaw / Pikirakatahi (2,819m -9,249 ft)

New Zealand

 In  Mount Earnslaw-Lake Wakatipu 1883 oil on canvas - Private collection New Zealand 

The Mountain 

Mount Earnslaw, (2,819m -9,249 ft) also named Pikirakatahi by Māori is located on New Zealand's South Island. It is named after Earnslaw (formerly Herneslawe) village in the parish of Eccles, Berwickshire, hometown of the surveyor John Turnbull Thomson's father.

Mount Earnslaw is within Mount Aspiring National Park at the southern end of the Forbes Range of New Zealand's Southern Alps. It is located 25 kilometres north of the settlement of Glenorchy, which lies at the northern end of Lake Wakatipu.

The painter 
 Edwyn Temple, or 'The Captain' as he was referred to by his friends and family, was born in England in 1835, the son of Lieutenant Colonel John Temple and the grandson of Grenville Temple-Temple 9th Baronet of Stowe.  Educated at Rugby School, he entered the military services in 1853. During a brief period in Italy a relative, Princess Pondalfina, recognised his ability and engaged a tutor to teach him the rudiments of painting.
Temple was ensigned in 1854 and became a Captain in the 55th Foot (Westmoreland) Regiment in 1858. He later served in the Crimea and in India from 1864 to 1866. By that time he had married and the first of a family of nine children had been born. It was more than nine years after retiring from the army that he decided to emigrate with his wife and family to New Zealand, arriving in Lyttelton on 25 October 1879.
Within a very short time of his arrival, he was established and developed a network of ex-military friends in Christchurch. Some of these were among the group that got together in June 1880 to form the Canterbury Society of Arts. Temple's role in its formation cannot be overstated and, in acknowledgment of this, he was elected to the key role of Secretary/Treasurer of the Society.
In 1882 he moved to Geraldine to a property, 'Castlewood', which he had purchased the previous year. There he lived and farmed for almost three decades, a Justice of the Peace from 1883, but mostly concentrating on painting before retiring to live in Timaru in the 1900s.
There is no question that Temple had an inner drive. He was a compulsive sketcher who drew on any piece of paper readily at hand as the mood took him; letters, ledgers, telegrams, envelopes, even wrapping paper were all targets for his pen, pencil or brush. His imagination was fertile and, coupled with a sardonic wit, resulted in many lively and amusing drawings and paintings. Though he was not considered to be a professional artist in the accepted sense, he was serious in his endeavours with painting and his approach was nothing short of professional. To have spent the time to produce such a quantity of work, of which those in this exhibition are only a small representation, shows that he was not just engaged in a diverting pastime.
Between 1880 and 1892, which was his most active period as an artist in New Zealand, Temple made many trips over the South Island with his relative and friend James Dupré Lance of Horsley Down Station. He also travelled with the government Surveyor John H. Baker. It was during these trips that he made sketches that were later developed into more major paintings, many of which he regularly showed at either the Canterbury Society of Arts, or the Otago Art Society annual exhibitions where they often received favourable notice from contemporary reviewers.
Temple also exhibited beyond New Zealand, first in 1880 in Melbourne, then in 1886 at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition London. He was also represented at the New Zealand Industrial Exhibition in Wellington in 1885 and the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition held in Dunedin in 1889–90.
He made return trips to England in 1892 and 1909 during which he made many landscape paintings.
Although the landscape was dominant in Temple's work, it was the alpine region of the South Island that particularly interested him and made him recognised in Canterbury as a specialist in this genre. Lakes Wanaka and Wakatipu were of special interest and these locales formed the backdrop to his imagery. From an early age Temple had visited Switzerland and the Lake District where several of his uncles had established themselves as gentry around Lake Ullswater and, in a sense, he had found a New Zealand equivalent to this experience. At the time of his death in 1920 Temple had amassed a considerable body of work that included paintings and drawings from his imagination that were pure fantasy as well as landscape, caricature and narrative subjects. Today, many hundreds of works are held by Temple's descendants scattered throughout the world but he is also represented in collections held by the National Library of Australia, Canberra; Hocken Library, Dunedin; Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington; Centre of Contemporary Art (incorporating Canterbury Society of Arts) Christchurch; as well as the Robert McDougall Art Gallery.
=> Courstesy Christchurch Art Gallery / Te Puna o Waiwhetū
___________________________________________
2019 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau 

MOUNT TARAWERA AND TERRACES BY JOHN HOYTE

JOHN HOYTE (1835-1913) 

Mount Tarawera (1, 111m - 3,645ft)

New Zealand

1.  In  White Terraces, Tepapa, oil on canvas, 1875,

The mountain 
Mount Tarawera (1, 111m - 3,645ft) is the volcano responsible for one of New Zealand's largest historic eruptions. Located 24 kilometres southeast of Rotorua in the North Island, it consists of a series of rhyolitic lava domes that were fissured down the middle by an explosive basaltic eruption in 1886, which killed an estimated 120 people. These fissures run for about 17 kilometres northeast-southwest.
The volcano's component domes include Ruawahia Dome, Tarawera Dome and Wahanga Dome. It is surrounded by several lakes, most of which were created or drastically altered by the 1886 eruption. These lakes include Lakes Tarawera, Rotomahana, Rerewhakaaitu, Okataina, Okareka, Tikitapu (Blue Lake) and Rotokakahi (Green Lake). The Tarawera River runs northeastwards across the northern flank of the mountain from Lake Tarawera.
Main eruptions 
- 1315 : Mount Tarawera erupted for the fist time on modern history. The ash thrown from this event may have affected temperatures around the globe and precipitated the Great Famine of 1315–17 in Europe.
- 1886 : Shortly after midnight on the morning of 10 June 1886, a series of more than 30 increasingly strong earthquakes were felt in the Rotorua area and an unusual sheet lightning display was observed from the direction of Tarawera. At around 2:00 am a larger earthquake was felt and followed by the sound of an explosion. By 2:30 am Mount Tarawera's three peaks had erupted, blasting three distinct columns of smoke and ash thousands of metres into the sky (see painting above). At around 3.30 am, the largest phase of the eruption commenced; vents at Rotomahana produced a pyroclastic surge that destroyed several villages within a 6 kilometre radius, and the Pink and White Terraces appeared to be obliterated.
The eruption was heard clearly as far away as Blenheim and the effects of the ash in the air were observed as far south as Christchurch, over 800 km away. In Auckland the sound of the eruption and the flashing sky was thought by some to be an attack by Russian warships.
Although the official contemporary death toll was 153, exhaustive research by physicist Ron Keam only identified 108 people killed by the eruption. Much of the discrepancy was due to misspelled names and other duplications. Allowing for some unnamed and unknown victims, he estimated that the true death toll was 120 at most.  Some people claim that many more people died.
The eruption also buried many Māori villages, including Te Wairoa which has now become a tourist attraction (Buried Village of Te Wairoa) and the world-famous Pink and White Terraces were lost. A small portion of the Pink Terraces was rediscovered under Lake Rotomahana 125 years later. Approximately 2 cubic kilometres of tephra was erupted, more than Mount St. Helens ejected in 1980. Many of the lakes surrounding the mountain had their shapes and areas dramatically altered, especially the eventual enlargement of Lake Rotomahana, the largest crater involved in the eruption, as it re-filled with water.
Legend
One legend surrounding the 1886 eruption is that of the phantom canoe. Eleven days before the eruption, a boat full of tourists returning from the Terraces saw what appeared to be a war canoe approach their boat, only to disappear in the mist half a mile from them. One of the witnesses was a clergyman, a local Maori man from the Te Arawa iwi. Nobody around the lake owned such a war canoe, and nothing like it had been seen on the lake for many years. It is possible that the rise and fall of the lake level caused by pre eruption fissures had freed a burial waka (canoe) from its resting place. Traditionally dead chiefs were tied in an upright position. A number of letters have been published from the tourists who experienced the event.
Though skeptics maintained that it was a freak reflection seen on the mist, tribal elders at Te Wairoa claimed that it was a waka wairua (spirit canoe) and was a portent of doom. It has been suggested that the waka was actually a freak wave on the water, caused by seismic activity below the lake, but locals believe that a future eruption will be signaled by the reappearance of the canoe.

 The artist 
John Barr Clark Hoyte (1835 –1913) was a New Zealand artist and teacher. He was born in London, England. 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.
Hoyte brought a professional determination to his career. He exhibited paintings whenever and wherever he could, in his home and studio, at fêtes and fairs and in many formal art exhibitions in both New Zealand and Australia. He was tireless in his support of formal structures for the embryonic antipodean art world.

MT ARTHUR/ TUAO WHAREPAPA BY JOHN BARR CLARK HOYTE

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.

MOUNT PEEL BY EDWYN TEMPLE

EDWYN TEMPLE (1835-1921)

Mount Peel   (1,743 m  - 5,719 ft) 

 New Zealand 

 

In Canterbury plain, New Zealand ( Mt Peel)

Christchurch Art Gallery / Te Puna o Waiwhetū

The mountain 
Mount Peel  often refered as Big Mount Peel   (1,743 m  - 5,719 ft) is a mountain located in South Canterbury, New Zealand. It consists of three peaks :  Big Mt Peel,  (1,743 m  - 5,719 ft),  Middle Mt Peel (1,583 m or 5,194 ft) and Little Mt Peel/Huatekerekere (1,311 m or 4,301 ft).
Mt Peel is  owned by the Department of Conservation and Mt Peel Station. It lies just south of the Rangitata river and is 22 kilometres (14 mi) north-west of Geraldine.
The Peel Forest Park Scenic Reserve is the largest in the Geraldine area, covering 769 hectares (1,900 acres) around Little Mt Peel/Huatekerekere.
The nearby forest was named by Francis Jollie, who settled in the area in late 1853. Jollie had named the forest after Sir Robert Peel, the British Prime Minister of the United Kingdom who had died in 1850, the year that Canterbury was founded. The mountain and the nearby community of Peel Forest also took Peel's name.
Mt Peel and the surrounding Peel Forest contain many well maintained and popular walking tracks.
Flora and fauna. There is lots of unique flora and fauna in Peel Forest. The three largest trees in Peel Forest belong to the family Podocarpaceae, a very ancient family going back in time more than 100 million years. The three large trees are kahikatea (white pine), tōtara, and mataī (black pine).
There are at least ten species of native bird occur in the forest including bellbird, silvereye, tomtit, rifleman, grey warbler, kererū, fantail, silvereye, shining cuckoo and longtailed cuckoo. There are also many lizards including the jeweled gecko and McCann's skink.

The artist 
 Edwyn Temple, or 'The Captain' as he was referred to by his friends and family, was born in England in 1835, the son of Lieutenant Colonel John Temple and the grandson of Grenville Temple-Temple 9th Baronet of Stowe.  Educated at Rugby School, he entered the military services in 1853. During a brief period in Italy a relative, Princess Pondalfina, recognised his ability and engaged a tutor to teach him the rudiments of painting.
Temple was ensigned in 1854 and became a Captain in the 55th Foot (Westmoreland) Regiment in 1858. He later served in the Crimea and in India from 1864 to 1866. By that time he had married and the first of a family of nine children had been born. It was more than nine years after retiring from the army that he decided to emigrate with his wife and family to New Zealand, arriving in Lyttelton on 25 October 1879.
Within a very short time of his arrival, he was established and developed a network of ex-military friends in Christchurch. Some of these were among the group that got together in June 1880 to form the Canterbury Society of Arts. Temple's role in its formation cannot be overstated and, in acknowledgment of this, he was elected to the key role of Secretary/Treasurer of the Society.
In 1882 he moved to Geraldine to a property, 'Castlewood', which he had purchased the previous year. There he lived and farmed for almost three decades, a Justice of the Peace from 1883, but mostly concentrating on painting before retiring to live in Timaru in the 1900s.
There is no question that Temple had an inner drive. He was a compulsive sketcher who drew on any piece of paper readily at hand as the mood took him; letters, ledgers, telegrams, envelopes, even wrapping paper were all targets for his pen, pencil or brush. His imagination was fertile and, coupled with a sardonic wit, resulted in many lively and amusing drawings and paintings. Though he was not considered to be a professional artist in the accepted sense, he was serious in his endeavours with painting and his approach was nothing short of professional. To have spent the time to produce such a quantity of work, of which those in this exhibition are only a small representation, shows that he was not just engaged in a diverting pastime.
Between 1880 and 1892, which was his most active period as an artist in New Zealand, Temple made many trips over the South Island with his relative and friend James Dupré Lance of Horsley Down Station. He also travelled with the government Surveyor John H. Baker. It was during these trips that he made sketches that were later developed into more major paintings, many of which he regularly showed at either the Canterbury Society of Arts, or the Otago Art Society annual exhibitions where they often received favourable notice from contemporary reviewers.
Temple also exhibited beyond New Zealand, first in 1880 in Melbourne, then in 1886 at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition London. He was also represented at the New Zealand Industrial Exhibition in Wellington in 1885 and the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition held in Dunedin in 1889–90.
He made return trips to England in 1892 and 1909 during which he made many landscape paintings.
Although the landscape was dominant in Temple's work, it was the alpine region of the South Island that particularly interested him and made him recognised in Canterbury as a specialist in this genre. Lakes Wanaka and Wakatipu were of special interest and these locales formed the backdrop to his imagery. From an early age Temple had visited Switzerland and the Lake District where several of his uncles had established themselves as gentry around Lake Ullswater and, in a sense, he had found a New Zealand equivalent to this experience. At the time of his death in 1920 Temple had amassed a considerable body of work that included paintings and drawings from his imagination that were pure fantasy as well as landscape, caricature and narrative subjects. Today, many hundreds of works are held by Temple's descendants scattered throughout the world but he is also represented in collections held by the National Library of Australia, Canberra; Hocken Library, Dunedin; Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington; Centre of Contemporary Art (incorporating Canterbury Society of Arts) Christchurch; as well as the Robert McDougall Art Gallery.

=> Courstesy Christchurch Art Gallery / Te Puna o Waiwhetū

___________________________________________
2019 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau