The National Gallery of New Zealand appointed two representatives in London from the 1950s to the 1970s, of which the second was Mary Chamot. She recommended and purchased works of British and European art that enriched to collection that became part of The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. This paper is both a history and an appreciation of the contribution Chamot made to that collection.

Art, collection, Chamot, Maclennan, Day, academy, gallery

Mary Chamot (1899–1983) acted as the London-based agent for the National Art Gallery of New Zealand (NAG) from 1965 until 1977. She was an art historian and curator, recently retired from her position as Assistant Keeper (First Class) at the Tate Gallery, London. Through her life’s work, Chamot had developed extensive contacts in the art world, both in Britain and abroad, that she drew upon in her recommendations for acquisitions for the NAG.

Chamot was born in Russia, where she began training as an artist but crucially recommenced her studies at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, alongside a New Zealander, Ernest Heber Thompson, with whom she kept in contact over many years. Thompson was the first agent for the NAG in London from 1951 to 1966 and Chamot was appointed to succeed him on his recommendation.

The role Chamot played in building the art collection at the NAG needs to be considered within the historical context into which she stepped so boldly. Any “national” gallery of art flies an ambitious pennant. It is declaring that its collection is of national significance. However, the phrase “of national significance” is itself open to a range of interpretations. Is the gallery’s mission to display the best of a “nation’s” art, created locally, or does it have grander ambitions, collecting and exhibiting masterpieces from a wider context, following some assumed aesthetic agenda? In Britain, the National Gallery displayed what could be called “treasures of international significance”, following the tenets of a view of art history based upon an historical European model, whilst the Tate Gallery collected almost exclusively British art. In New Zealand, the history of art galleries was, until the mid-twentieth century, largely parochial. The galleries in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin followed an amalgam of the collecting models established by the National Gallery and Tate in London.

Wellington became the capital of New Zealand in 1865 but lagged behind other cities in having a functioning and well-funded art gallery. The New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington, founded in 1882, initiated a collection, which formed the basis of the National Art Gallery’s collection when it finally opened in 1936. However, it was not up to the standards of the other metropolitan galleries, either in their span of art’s history, or in quality or quantity. In 1951, when the NAG had re-established itself after the interruptions of the Second World War, it was decided to appoint a buyer in London to purchase works to fill gaps in the collection, and to extend its reach into more Modernist tastes. This decision was a signal that New Zealand’s culture was still strongly anchored to Great Britain.

Figure 1. 

Nadia Benois, Portrait of Mary Chamot, 1927, coloured chalks, 290 × 450 mm. Gift of Mary Chamot, 1983 (Te Papa 1983-0023-9).

Thompson, though New Zealand-born, was a London-trained etcher, whose purchase recommendations reflected artistic tastes closely tied to those of his teachers at the Slade and the Royal Academy of Art. Chamot was arguably more cosmopolitan, her tastes honed in St Petersburg, and later enriched within the sphere of British art, through her studies at the Slade and her work at the Tate. Chelsea Nichols, a former Curator Modern Art at Te Papa, wrote that ‘Chamot pushed the conservative gallery to develop more open-minded attitudes to abstraction and other forms of avant-garde art, helping to build a stronger and more daring collection of international modern art’.¹

This paper is the first extended essay to place Chamot’s contribution to building the collection of the NAG in that historical context. It chronicles her relationship with the two directors with whom she worked and analyses a shift in collection policy, more firmly focussed on twentieth century, on contemporary, even Modernist, works, but still within a European mindset.²

The paper draws on archival sources, collection records, correspondence and analyses of artworks to highlight the connections between all the players active in the process of collection building at this stage of the National Art Gallery’s history. It argues that Chamot was at their vortex, and draws attention to her cosmopolitan experience, her commitment and legacy, all of which fed into her contribution to the development of a national collection.

The idea of a National Art Gallery for New Zealand was mooted as early as 1910, but legislation to bring it into effect was not passed until the National Gallery and Dominion Museum Act in 1930.³ A newly constructed building to house both the Gallery and Museum opened on Buckle Street, Te Aro, Wellington, in 1936, with the NAG taking the whole of the second floor.

The establishment of the gallery and museum was soon, and severely, disrupted when the building was requisitioned by the New Zealand Air Force during the Second World War (1941–1947). The nascent collection was stored in Hastings in the Hawke’s Bay, and not returned to Wellington until 1949.⁴ In effect, the NAG only came into existence as a permanent feature of the cultural life of the capital from that date.

Dunedin-born Stewart Maclennan (1903–1973) was appointed the first director of the NAG in 1949. Maclennan studied under John and Paul Nash, Edward Bawden and Eric Ravilious at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London. As a graduate of this college, Maclennan was a conservative artist and a perfectionist. He admired training and technique and was determined to enlarge the collection and to embellish its strengths through looking directly to London, the natural home of the art of the collection. He gave effect to this sentiment by appointing a London representative to purchase art for the gallery. In 1951 the Gallery management appointed Ernest Heber Thompson to fill this role.

Thompson (1891–1971) was also born in Dunedin where he attended the Dunedin School of Art. He worked as a commercial artist and cartoonist for the Otago Daily Times before enlisting in the New Zealand Army in 1915. Thompson was badly wounded in 1917 and, on demobilisation, was awarded a scholarship to study at the Slade School of Art. He became a well-respected etcher and painter, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy and other London institutions.

Under Thompson’s watch the NAG acquired works by key 20^th-century British artists, including Walter Sickert, Stanley Spencer and Jacob Epstein.⁵ Thompson was a talented graphic artist with discerning conservative tastes. However, he abhorred Modernism,⁶ as he understood it. He had a particular aversion for any work that smacked of “Abstraction”, a view he shared with Maclennan. In 1961 he complained to Maclennan:

…the ever recurring abstract business keeps raising its head. Have you a room…devoted to modern art? A sort of chamber of horrors. It is becoming increasingly persistent here… the young simply love it… Tooth’s were holding a show of six American painters. Large areas of flat colour in geometric shapes. They call themselves The Hard Edged painters. Can you beat it?⁷

In 1965, Thompson asked to retire as London agent and suggested to Maclennan that Mary Chamot would be an ideal person to don his mantle.⁸

Mary Chamot’s English-born father, Alfred Edward Chamot (1855–1934), was of French descent. After running a horticultural business in Moscow, he was appointed to administer the Imperial Palace Gardens in Strelna, near St Petersburg, the capital city of the Russian Empire, where Chamot was born in 1899. Her mother, Elizabeth Grooten, was of Dutch and German parentage. Mary grew up in a sophisticated, multilingual household. She was fluent in English, French, Russian and German, thus able to command a range of art history texts in adult life that made her of inestimable value to the institutions in which she found employment.

From 1914–15 she was enrolled in the studio of the painter and book illustrator Dmitry Kardovsky at the St Petersburg Academy. Nadia Benois, who became a life-long friend, was a fellow student.⁹ It is Benois who created the only known portrait of Chamot, which she later bequeathed to the NAG.

In 1918, during the Russian Revolution, the Chamot family made its way to relatives in Yorkshire, England, via Finland and Norway. Chamot recommenced her artistic training at the Slade, graduating alongside Thompson with a Fine Art Diploma in 1922. Whilst at the Slade, Chamot became a habitué of the apartment in Ridgemount Gardens, Bloomsbury, of Nadia Benois and her exotic Russo-German husband Jona (Klop) Ustinov, close to Chamot’s lodging in Gower Street. The Benois-Ustinov apartment became a centre for gatherings of painters, such as Augustus John, of gallerists and of the Franco-Russian art set in London. There Chamot befriended Nina Lefèvre, the Russian wife of the gallerist, Earnest-Albert Lefèvre, painting her portrait.¹⁰ It was through these extensive, intimate connections that Chamot became familiar with the latest trends in art and the gallery and museum worlds in London. These connections, that would serve her well in her future career, and her rich experience of the art world, were of use to her as the representative in London of the NAG. Though her training and experience were in total contrast to that of the culturally more conservative and circumscribed Heber Thompson, they shared a professional appreciation of quality and technical proficiency in the artists and artworks they recommended to Wellington.

Chamot went on to study art history at University College London, under Tancred Borenius, founder of Apollo, “A Journal of the Arts”. Borenius encouraged Chamot’s writing on art history, publishing her “Mogul Painting” in Apollo in 1926, alongside his own “Italian Cassone Painting” and other contributions to Apollo. Borenius and Chamot co-wrote “On a Group of Early Enamels, Possibly English”, published in The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 53, no. 309 (December 1928), thus deepening and extending her knowledge and skills.¹¹

Chamot worked as a relief lecturer at the National Gallery (1922) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (1924–39). In the 1960s she conducted adult education courses in art history at the Warburg Institute.¹² She was a prolific writer, completing her first book on English Medieval Enamels in 1930, followed by two Country Life books—Modern Painting in England (1937), in which she included the work of both Nadia Benois and Frances Hodgkins, and Painting in England: From Hogarth to Whistler (1939). In the 1920s, Chamot’s father became a very productive translator into English of books from the Russian and Mary followed suit with translations from the French,¹³ as well as compiling the catalogue of the great Exhibition of Russian Art held at 1 Belgrave Square in June-July 1935, together with her partner Helene (Loulette) von Gerebzow (Gerebzova).¹⁴

Chamot’s most significant appointment was as Assistant Keeper (1^st Class) at the Tate Gallery, where she worked from 1949 until her retirement in 1965. With Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, she compiled Tate Gallery: The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (2 volumes, Tate Gallery, 1964–5), which again included articles on both Benois and Hodgkins. Writing these two volumes often involved interviewing artists, visiting their studios and assessing their place in the London art world. Through this, Chamot developed an intimate understanding of the modern art world, which informed many of her recommendations for purchase.

As Dennis Farr pointed out in his obituary of Chamot, “she never lost her affection for Russia. She visited and took art tours to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and early 1970s. She wrote the first monograph of her friend the Russian avant-garde painter and designer Natalia Gontcharova (French edition, La Bibliothèque des Arts, 1972: English version 1979), as well as Goncharova: Stage Designs and Paintings (Oresko Books, London, 1979).¹⁵ Farr also recalled her connections to the art world, writing:

Her early days at the Slade had brought Chamot a wide circle of artist friends and collectors, notably Stanley and Gilbert Spencer, the Carlines, Paul (Lord) Methuen, Edward Bawden and Jim Ede, who would visit her at the Tate. As her much more junior colleague, I was privileged to share an office with her for almost a decade, yet although gregarious, in many ways she was a very private person; it was a standing joke, however, that Mary had cousins and relations in every European city of note, not to mention North America. She, and ‘Lulette’ Gerebzov (with whom she shared a house in Kensington for many years), threw marvellously Russian parties.¹⁶

The novelist Penelope Fitzgerald also recalled those parties. Fitzgerald’s biographer noted:

Chamot knew all about Burne-Jones and lent her [Fitzgerald] one of her treasures, the Italian notebook he kept in 1871¹⁷…This impressive woman was the link, in the 1970s, between Fitzgerald’s interest in Burne-Jones and her fascination with Russia.¹⁸

Her friendship with Chamot gave Fitzgerald, who visited Russia herself in 1975, the idea for her novel The Beginning of Spring (1988), set in Moscow.¹⁹

In February 1965, Thompson told Chamot that he would be retiring from the role of NAG agent in London and wondered if she would be interested in applying for the post.²⁰ He wrote to Maclennan, “Chamot is a name that occurred to me. She is retiring [from the Tate] in July and would be available if you are interested”.²¹ Chamot negotiated the terms of employment in April, agreeing to start her engagement from 1 October 1965 for a year, to see how the arrangement worked. She and Thompson would share the role in the meantime. The Committee of Management in Wellington approved her appointment on 27 May 1965.²²

On 25 September 1965 Thompson again met Chamot at the Tate, and reported to Maclennan:

Mary Chamot showed me their recent acquisitions and a pretty scruffy lot they were. I can see one or two arguments looming up ahead but Mary is not a rigid person, so it should be all good fun. Her tastes are rather inclined to the avant-garde. We shall have to impress upon her that we are not buying for the Tate. Our acquisitions have to last a lifetime, whereas [at the Tate] they can be turfed out any time and they wouldn’t notice it.²³

Thompson went on to say that he thought Chamot would like a Bill Culbert work they were jointly considering, a purchase that did not come to fruition.

By December 1965 ill health forced Thompson to take a lesser role in the partnership. However, he was somewhat unhappy about Chamot’s current enthusiasms. He made it clear that a painting she admired by an Indian artist, Siramdasu Rama Rao, currently studying at the Slade, did not suit his tastes. Neither was he enamoured of her choice of Will Roberts’ watercolour The Tip. However, as MacLennan was, in principle, keen to acquire a work by Roberts, Thompson acknowledged that “she will be able to get a Roberts if anyone can”.²⁴

Thompson’s reservations about the Roberts were revealing. He would have been attracted by the fact that Roberts had studied at The Slade under Tonks, like himself. He would also have admired the modest subject matter and technical expertise displayed by Roberts. However, in his earlier years Roberts had been a follower of Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism, an artist and movement antithetical to Thompson’s taste. In the end, though, it became clear that price was all important in any acquisition for the NAG. In 1966, Chamot sourced a large work by Wyndham Lewis, but had to settle for a smaller, nevertheless superb, drawing that was substantially less expensive, in 1967.²⁵

Thompson was obliged to carry some of the load until June 1966, as Chamot had an extensive lecture tour of Russia already planned before she took on the role of London agent for the NAG.²⁶ On 4 July 1966 she visited Thompson for a lunch at his home in Long Crendon to mark the end of the transition period and to commemorate Thompson’s dedicated service to the NAG. From then on, she took over the full responsibilities of London agent.

From 1965 to 1977 Chamot advised first Stewart Maclennan, then his successor, Melvin Day, on the selection and purchase of works from London for the NAG.²⁷ Chamot brought an experienced, cosmopolitan eye and mind to the task of collecting, without entirely departing from Thompson’s conservative approach. For example, in writing about the work of her friend Nadia Benois, Chamot praised her “baroque breadth of form, never losing her sense of structure, composition, and balance”.²⁸ This belief in the importance of form and composition was shared with both Thompson and Maclennan. For Chamot, it made sense to buy “the moderns” (here she probably had in mind “young artists setting out”, rather than those wishing to throw off the shackles of her conservative credo), as a consequence of the modest budget available for the purchase of works for the NAG. She later recalled that “they [the moderns] were less expensive then and I think New Zealand didn’t have a great deal of money to buy”.²⁹ Indeed, at first, her budget was a meagre £1,000 a year, one third of the total funds available for acquisitions. Maclennan reserved another £1,000 for purchases in New Zealand and Australia and put aside yet another £1,000 “for expensive future buys”, funds that Chamot might call upon in the case of a work becoming available considered of sufficient significance for the NAG.³⁰

Suggestions for purchase had not only to be within the meagre budget, but also within the taste range of the conservative Maclennan and the NAG Management Committee. Though Chamot had to clear all suggested purchases with Wellington, she was free to make her own suggestions with little guidance. Thompson and Chamot asked both Maclennan and Day to guide their choice, to give them a plan of action, but were presented with vague “policy statements” and unrealistic wish lists.³¹ However, they were both, separately, supplied with details of the current holdings of the NAG, meaning that their choices were not made in complete ignorance. All the parties involved—representatives, directors, and to a lesser extent Management Committee members—were well-aware of the financial limitations that made substantial purchases almost out of the question. The distance between London and Wellington and slowness of communication meant that the directors had little choice but to leave suggestions as to artists and works to their much-trusted representatives with their experience of the London art scene and its web of dealer galleries.

Maclennan was aware of the difficulties Chamot faced. Unlike Thompson, she knew next to nothing about New Zealand, its history, or its cultural complexities, and she was not familiar with the collection or gallery in Wellington. Maclennan was keen for her to visit but had no budget for such a luxury. He suggested Chamot write to David Peters, Director of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council, to invite her on a lecture tour on Modern Art, so that she could become more familiar with New Zealand, along with the National Art Gallery and its collection.³²

New Zealand may not have been able or willing to fund all of her visit, but Chamot took it upon herself to organise a North American tour in 1967, which she extended to take in New Zealand and Australia. She flew from California via Papeete to Auckland, where she called on a distant relative, Bertha Cane,³³ in Grafton, as well as discussing the exhibition of works by Frances Hodgkins that Gil Docking, Director of the Auckland Art Gallery, was assembling, to mark the centenary of her birth in 1869.

From Auckland, Chamot flew south, via the geysers, to meet Maclennan, who had made all the arrangements for her visit. She arrived in Wellington on 11 April 1967 and gave a lecture at the NAG on 13^th about “The Hermitage Museum, Leningrad”, for which she was paid a £20 fee. The lecture, to a crowd of 200 invited guests, earned her a letter of appreciation from a former Prime Minister, Walter Nash.³⁴ She also found time to advise Maclennan on rehanging the watercolours in the NAG. He agreed that “the gallery certainly does look richer and better” as a result.³⁵ Never for a moment exhausted, she then flew to Melbourne to begin a punishing whirlwind tour of Australian galleries.³⁶

During the period Chamot and Thompson worked together from October 1965 to March 1966, they visited galleries together and made several purchases, including Edward Burra’s dream-like watercolour The Juke Box (Te Papa 1965-0019-1). Later, Chamot pointed out that she was not “an admirer of Burra’s work and I don’t think I would have chosen it. But I do think he is an important artist and it’s a good thing to have him in the collection”.³⁷ The representatives obviously enjoyed chaffing each other: Burra was Thompson’s choice, Roberts was Chamot’s. Toleration of difference was a key to both their temperaments.

Chamot’s first recommendation and purchase for the NAG on her own behalf seemed a curious one. In 1966 she acquired Turupu Kanumalu, by Siramdasu Rama Rao (Te Papa 1966-0009-1). Rao, born and trained in India, was awarded a Commonwealth Scholarship at the age of 27 to study in London at the Slade under William Coldstream. As Thompson and Chamot, as well as Maclennan, had also studied at the Slade, they naturally favoured the work of artists with their shared training ground, such as Ben Nicholson, Paul Nash, Gilbert and Stanley Spencer. However, it could be argued that Chamot was putting a stake in the ground. Rao’s mystical abstract painting would not have been recommended by Thompson but struck a chord with Chamot’s more cosmopolitan tastes. The Rao was followed by works by other “Modernist” artists, an Orphist gouache by the Russian Sonia Delaunay (Te Papa 1966-0032-1) and a Vorticist drawing by Wyndham Lewis in 1966–7 (Te Papa 1967-0004-1), good quality lesser works at a price the NAG could afford.

In 1967 Chamot and Maclennan purchased a work by another contemporary of Chamot’s, Mary Potter. Potter had also studied under Tonks at the Slade (1918–21), and her work shared affinities with that of Ivon Hitchins and Winifred Nicholson, artists favoured by both Chamot and Maclennan. Maclennan showed his delight with Potter’s The Studio (Te Papa 1967-0023-1), which he had hanging in his room at the NAG, describing it as “a real joy”.³⁸A further purchase by an artist taught by Tonks at the Slade was Eileen Agar’s Woman Reading, (Te Papa 1972-0008-1). Agar was described by Chamot as a “principal Surrealist”, who lived “just around the corner”.³⁹ This surrealist collage, purchased in 1972, remains a major work by a woman surrealist in Te Papa’s collection.

Chamot made her first purchase of a work by Frances Hodgkins, Double portrait No. 2. (Te Papa 1967-0006-1) for the NAG in 1967, and, fired by her association with Gil Docking, purchased a further fifteen works by Hodgkins for the NAG over the coming years. Chamot met with Docking when she was in New Zealand in 1967, and they worked together successfully over the next two years in the lead-up to Hodgkins centenary exhibition in 1969. Docking acknowledged her major contribution in the catalogue published to mark the occasion:

Figure 2. 

Francis Hodgkins, Double portrait No. 2 (Katharine and Anthony West), 1937, oil on canvas, 825 × 690 (Te Papa 1967-0006-1). Purchased for £307/2/6 from Hambledon Gallery, Blanford, UK, with Wellington City Council Picture Purchase Fund.

We have been ably assisted by Miss Mary Chamot, who acted as the London representative, corresponding with English owners and inspecting works in many collections. In addition we have made extensive use of Miss Chamot’s catalogue published in Francis Hodgkins: Four Vital Years by Arthur R. Howell.⁴⁰

Chamot was particularly diligent in filling some of the gaps in the NAG’s representation of Hodgkins, both chronologically and in terms of stylistic reach, for example from an early watercolour, Street Scene in Holland of 1903 (Te Papa 1972-0025-4), to the superb mid-period watercolour Road to the Hills, Ibiza of 1933 (Te Papa1975-0040-3), onto the near-abstract Still-Life of c. 1935 (Te Papa 1973-0001-1), reaching the late Expressionist Purbeck Courtyard, Early Afternoon of 1944 (Te Papa 1973-00010-1). Hodgkins reflected Chamot’s admiration of the artists exhibiting with the former Seven and Five Society in London in the 1930s, her love of the British Neo-Romantics, and her friendships among those artists who had taught Maclennan—the Nash brothers, Bawden and Ravilious.⁴¹ She bought more works by Hodgkins than any other artist, including some magnificent paintings from the painter’s late period such as Barn Interior, Dolaucathy, 1942.

Although Chamot bought sixteen works by Francis Hodgkins, she was fully aware of Hodgkins’ weaknesses. As Thompson reported to MacLennan in 1952:

Mary Chamot, who is assistant keeper of the Tate Gallery, is unsure [about Hodgkins]: her work, as you know, varied in quality quite a lot. It is a presumption on my part, but I think it would be almost criminal if the NAG of NZ did not give FH a good show. She is the only artist from NZ who has international repute…except David Low who is in a different category. Miss Chamot, whom I have known for 20 years, tells me that they are giving FH a show at the Tate in May [1952] See Arthur Howell’s book Four Vital Years [with a foreword by John Piper, a list of the artist’s principal works and a brief chronology by Mary Chamot…Personally, I would like to see in your gallery a selection of her work showing its development from the representational or naturalistic period to the purely abstract of her latest phase”.⁴²

Figure 3. 

Frances Hodgkins, Quarry Farm, Wiltshire, circa 1937, oil on canvas, 749 × 1004 (Te Papa, 1975-0040-4). Purchased 1975 from Wellington City Council Picture Purchase Fund.

Chamot helped deliver this wish.

Both Maclennan and Day were keen for their representatives to keep an eye on exhibitions by New Zealand artists, or artists with significant New Zealand connections, working in Britain and Europe, such as Bill Culbert and Robert Walls.⁴³ In turn, Chamot was often attracted to the young, up-and-coming, Modernists, out-of-the-left field, comparatively inexpensive innovators. In theory, these interests of representatives and directors had overlapping areas of contiguity. However, Chamot was interested in testing the limits of this compatibility.

Maclennan hosted “Marcel Duchamp: The Mary Sisler Collection” in Wellington in June 1967, on tour from New York. This showcased seventy-eight works demonstrating Duchamp’s development from comparatively conventional drawings and paintings to the readymades, such as Bicycle Wheel (1913) and the Surrealist “joke” Prière de Toucher (1947). Maclennan informed Chamot that “The Duchamp caused such a negative stir [in Wellington] that the climate is not ripe for ‘readymades’”. In response, Chamot, somewhat sharply, pointed out that Duchamp’s work was “well-liked by the young in London”.⁴⁴ This correspondence was in the context of discussions over the possible purchase of a work by Edward Bullmore, a New Zealand-born Surrealist and exhibitor of objects trouvés, then resident in London. Chamot was impressed by Bullmore’s work and had selected a drawing of an assembly of chairs for possible purchase. Maclennan was at least prepared to test the reaction of the Management Committee, which, not surprisingly, rejected the suggestion in no uncertain terms, their negativity triggered by the Wellington public’s reaction to Duchamp’s readymades.⁴⁵ Bullmore’s drawing was returned to London. A further, but temporary, line had been drawn in the sands of taste. Chamot’s enthusiasm for Bullmore’s work was eventually rewarded and his mysterious, Surrealist image of Hikurangi No. 3 (Te Papa 1971-0035-1) was purchased for the NAG in 1971.

Figure 4. 

Edward Bullmore, Hikurangi no.3, 1963, London, collage and oil on canvas (Te Papa 1971-0035-1), purchased 1971.

In 1967 Maclennan wondered if Chamot could locate work by William Henry (Curly) Allen (1894–1988) a British-born painter, trained at the Royal Academy, who was appointed to teach at the Dunedin School of Art in New Zealand in 1925 alongside Robert Nettleton Field.⁴⁶ Maclennan pointed out that it was Allen who had persuaded him to seek further training in England. Allen returned to Britain in 1946 to teach in Walthamstow. Chamot did find two splendid paintings by Allen, one with a more than suitable subject, Otago Farm (1930).⁴⁷

Alongside Chamot’s relationships with artists, dealers and collectors, there were other avenues available for acquiring British works for the NAG. For example, The Contemporary Art Society (CAS), with its office in the Tate Gallery on Millbank, made annual distributions of works of art each July to galleries in Britain and the Commonwealth. This benign form of patronage was overseen by the stylish and energetic secretary, Pauline Vogelpoel. Galleries made applications for works from an annual list and these works would be on view in London at a wine and refreshment lunch. Applications were invited for Category A works, eligible for presentation to galleries subscribing £30 or more a year, and for Category B for those galleries subscribing under £30 and not less than £15. The NAG could only afford Category B works. Chamot had a good working relationship with Vogelpoel and made good use of this added source of patronage for the NAG.

For example, in 1963 the Contemporary Art Society gifted the NAG a drawing, Study of a Woman, by Walter Monnington (Te Papa 1963-0008-1)⁴⁸, and in 1965 contributed £170 towards a Barbara Hepworth oval form (Te Papa 1964-0014-1), as well as a modernist sculpture, Scamander by John Wragg (Te Papa 1965-0015-1).⁴⁹ During the period between Maclennan’s departure and Day’s arrival, Chamot informed Elizabeth Northmore, appointed Acting Director, that in the latest round of distributions by the Contemporary Art Society the NAG had been gifted Keith Grant’s Lava Field (Te Papa 1968-0023-1). Chamot was in the habit of sending her own notes on works purchased or gifted, but her side of the correspondence is frequently missing from the archive, together with these most informative notes.

In 1966 Maclennan showed a particular interest in the progress of Melvin Day, a New Zealand student at the Courtauld Institute in London, writing to Chamot, “have a look [at his work] and advise”.⁵⁰ Chamot went to Day’s exhibition and arranged for the artist to send slides of his paintings to Wellington, from which Maclennan selected the 1965 oil painting Old Script (Te Papa 1966-0039-1) for acquisition. Day, with a canny eye to the future, followed up this useful connection with subsequent visits to Chamot. In 1968, when the NAG was arranging interviews for Maclennan’s successor, Chamot was asked to join a committee in London to interview the applicants from Britain.⁵¹ Maclennan left Chamot in no doubt that he thought none of the six applicants from New Zealand and three from Australia “were promising”. Day was duly appointed the new director from 15 May 1968, but did not formally take up the post until September. On his arrival at the NAG, Day was dismayed by the paucity of good sculpture in the collection. He was keen to get rid of many of the “heads” and to replace them with “more modern pieces”.⁵² He was also keen “to buy Gothic/Romanesque works—psalter illustrations, enamels, caskets, etc.”⁵³ In 1969, Chamot was able to locate two affordable “Gothic” works for Day: a page from a 13^th century bible (Te Papa 1970-0001-2) at £100 and a page from a 14^th century Rhenish psalter (Te Papa 1970-0001-3) from Maggs in Bloomsbury.⁵⁴ Day also mentioned buying works from former friends in London, such as Vic Gray, then teaching in Bristol Art School, who had formerly worked with Frank Malina in Paris.⁵⁵

Chamot found herself gently tempering Day’s “new boy on the block” enthusiasm to get rid of some of “the heads”,⁵⁶ as well as pointing out the impracticality of purchasing good modern sculpture, such as a work by Henry Moore, not only because such a work would be quite beyond the NAG’s budget, but also because of the logistical problems of transport and finding a suitable, and available, site in Wellington.⁵⁷ At the same time, Chamot was busy inviting Day’s wife, Oroya, to tea in her Kensington apartment before she left to join her husband in New Zealand.⁵⁸ Chamot found Day’s demands more and more unrealistic, forever asking favours, at the same time as requesting large and expensive pieces, such as that elusive Henry Moore. The budget could not accommodate even a fraction of his requests. This flurry of demands was put on hold whilst Chamot completed her second tour of North America in early 1969 but resumed immediately on her return to London. Could she find an Alfred Wallis, a Christopher Wood, and a Ben Nicholson?

Chamot used her considerable knowledge to good effect when dealing with offers of works by individual punters. For example, in March 1969 she was asked from New Zealand to view a portrait of Sir Joseph Banks on sale for £12,000 from W. F. Hammond of Bowley House, Lymington in Hampshire. In May, Chamot visited Hammond and examined the unsigned and highly varnished portrait. In her view, it was a copy, and she concluded that Hammond was asking a lot more than he had paid for it because of “the recent interest in Cook and his voyages”.⁵⁹ On returning to London, she visited the National Portrait Gallery to view their many portraits and prints of Banks. She came away with the view that this anonymous copy was worth no more than £1,000 and, “considering the many other things the gallery needs”, that there was no point in pursuing this Banks portrait any further.

Thompson was in touch in May 1969 wanting to send some of his own work to New Zealand. Could Chamot find out from Day how well he was represented in New Zealand galleries? This process took some time, but ultimately the Hocken Gallery added to its rich collection by eight works between 1967 and 1971 and the NAG expanded its already large collection, made over the years principally by Maclennan, by five more in 1971. Other Thompsons found their way into other collections in Dunedin, Christchurch and Auckland. Day then turned his enthusiasm to Old Master drawings, as teaching tools, prompted by the introduction of a course in Art History at Victoria University of Wellington, to which Day promised to contribute a paper on the “Art of the Renaissance”.⁶⁰

Chamot’s idea of what was appropriate for a collection in the New Zealand context could sometimes be off mark. For example, she was impressed by an exhibition at Gimpel Fils by the Scottish Zen neo-primitivist Alan Davie, “£450 for gouache, oils same price”, suggesting they would “link up” with Māori works.⁶¹ She seemed unaware of the history of Māori art and, from our current perspective, of the inappropriateness of comparing the formal qualities of Davie’s paintings with images by Māori artists. It was a case of aesthetic incongruity, not unlike the suggestion made later by William Rubin in his catalogue of Primitivism in 20^th Century Art at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1984, on the perceived formal similarities between what was at the time referred to as “‘primitive” and “abstract” art. Chamot was merely showing the European perspective of her background and training she shared with Thompson and Maclennan.

Chamot was on surer ground when dealing with contemporary British art, with which she was intimately familiar. She not only knew the market but was also a close friend of many of the leading artists of her day. For example, Chamot was close to the Spencer family, brothers Stanley and Gilbert, so it is not a surprise that they feature in her purchase from the publisher and art dealer Alistair MacAlpine of Stanley’s Joachim and the Shepherds (Te Papa 1965-0021-1) (“the varnish needed attention”),⁶² in her gift of his Marriage in Cana (Te Papa 1976-0006-1) in 1976, and with her bequest of Gilbert Spencer’s Joseph and Potifer’s Wife (Te Papa 1994-0022-6). In an interview in 1981 with Anne Kirker, then curator of Prints and Drawings at the NAG, Chamot recalled that Stanley “was small and looked like a workman and was very energetic and very intense in everything he said. He was very widely read…I once had a party of old Slade colleagues, and he was the life and soul of it”.⁶³

In the past Chamot had known Ben Nicholson well. In 1981, she described how she “had been down to St Ives where I met a lot of the artists, and I certainly think that he is an important person to have in the collection”.⁶⁴ However, she added, her experienced critical antenna waving sententiously, when “[she] saw his most recent exhibition [1980] just last year and I thought the paintings were rather dull. Or is it the same jargon in a different position?”⁶⁵ The work she purchased from the Crane Kalman Gallery on Brompton Road—specialists in the work of Ben Nicholson—Painting (J.L.M.) February 2-47 (Te Papa, 1970-0009-1) was one of her boldest buys, from Wellington’s perspective, at £3550.⁶⁶ Charlton Edgar, the director of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, also wanted to buy an Alfred Wallis and Christopher Wood, but, as he put it, a Ben Nicholson, for £10,500 “would collapse the New Zealand economy”!⁶⁷

Chamot first met the Russian artist Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) in 1953 when she accompanied Sir John Rothenstein (1901–1992), Director of the Tate Gallery, on his trip to Paris to buy works for the Tate.⁶⁸ On this occasion, he acquired three paintings, two by Goncharova, Linen (1913) and Three Young Women (1920), as well as a single work by her painter partner, Mikhail Larionov (1881–1961). From that moment Chamot and Goncharova became firm friends, maintaining a frequent correspondence from February 1954. Chamot visited Goncharova and Larionov in Paris a number of times. She became caught up with Goncharova’s financial woes, especially when the artist had to pay large sums to finance Larionov’s hospitalisation after a stroke, and was obliged to sell her works to do so.

Figure 5. 

Ben Nicholson, February 2, 1947 (Painting J.L.M), oil and pencil on wood panel on composition board, 374 × 304 (Te Papa 1970-0009-1), purchased 1970 with Ellen Eames Collection funds, with assistance from the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand. Purchase price £3550 © Angela Verren Taunt 2013. All Rights Reserved. DACS./Copyright Agency, 2024.

In 1960, Chamot, together with the art historian Camilla Gay (1936–1971), organised a retrospective of Larionov and Goncharova’s work, supported by the Arts Council of Great Britain.⁶⁹ The exhibition travelled from Leeds to Bristol and on to London, and was a birthday gift to the artists who would both turn eighty in 1961.⁷⁰ It included 123 works by Goncharova, and led to the acquisition of a number of her costume sketches and drawings by the Victoria and Albert Museum. In June 1961 Chamot helped to celebrate Larionov’s eightieth birthday in Paris, where she took many historically significant photographs of the artists and their works.⁷¹ She continued to visit them in Paris until their deaths, Goncharova in 1962 and Larionov in 1964. It was in these years that Chamot acquired her own collection of Goncharova’s work.

In 1970 Melvin Day became more aware of Chamot’s passionate interest in the work of Goncharova when she mentioned she was busy writing a book Gontcharova, to be published in French in Paris in 1972, with an English version, Goncharova: Stage Designs and Paintings, coming out in 1979.⁷² This sparked Day’s interest in buying Russian art for the NAG, especially when Chamot put her obligations to the NAG in London on hold whilst she undertook two trips to Russia between May and July 1970. In September that year she mentioned to Day that the Annely Juda Gallery in London had drawings by Kazimir Malevich for sale, and he replied “We could do with some Russian work”.⁷³ Chamot, however, later became less enthusiastic about the Malevich drawings. Annely Juda wanted £2000 for drawings that were almost fragments, such was the current interest in the Russian pioneer of non-objective abstraction.⁷⁴

The following year, in 1971, Day repeated his interest in things Russian, writing, “I look forward to a Larionov. What about an early-ish Goncharova?”⁷⁵ The same year Chamot made a second round-the-world-trip, visiting New Zealand along the way. She travelled first to Auckland to talk with Gil Docking about further embellishing the Auckland Art Gallery’s collection of works by Frances Hodgkins, and then on to Wellington, where she met Day. They discussed purchasing policy for the future, along with possible gifts of works by Goncharova. Although they were brief, Chamot’s visits to New Zealand made a distinct impression on her. From then on, she intensified her willingness not only to purchase works, but also to offer gifts and bequests from her own modest, but significant, collection to the NAG.

On 19 April 1972, Chamot sent a list of the works in her collection she intended to gift to the NAG. Almost a decade later, in 1981, Anne Kirker, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the NAG from 1979 to 1986, visited Chamot in London. As a result Kirker recommended that the NAG accept all but four of works on Chamot’s 1972 list.⁷⁶ Luit Bieringa, director of the NAG from 1979, immediately wrote to Chamot, resending Kirker’s list of works and enquiring after their status.⁷⁷ Chamot agreed to gift the works selected,⁷⁸ which were sent to New Zealand in 1983, when Chamot finally moved out of her apartment in Melbury Road, Kensington.⁷⁹ The ten-year gap between intention and execution of the gift was because Chamot was so attached to her personal collection that she wanted it with her until the last moment.

Following Goncharova’s death, and a year before his own, Larionov married his mistress of 30 years, Alexandra Klavdievna Tomilina, to safeguard her rights to those works that remained in Paris.⁸⁰ In 1973, Chamot had arranged for Tomilina to gift three Goncharova paintings to the NAG.⁸¹ These arrived in Wellington in March 1974 and included Scene in an Orchard [poss. Suzanna and the Elders]⁸², c. 1908, oil on canvas, 1000 × 1200 mm, (Te Papa 1973-0003-2), Sunflowers and a Portrait, c. 1908–09⁸³, oil on canvas, 1170 × 1090 mm, (Te Papa 1973-0003-3) and Woman Carrying Fruit on her Head [Porteuse de Raisins], c. 1911, oil on canvas, 916 × 742 mm, (Te Papa 1973-0003-1). Melvin Day wrote a letter of thanks to Tomilina (whilst mistaking her for Goncharova’s daughter), added that the NAG would be producing a booklet on the works with a text by Chamot.⁸⁴

The works Chamot finally sent in 1983 included four paintings by Goncharova: Yellow Roses, 1912–20, oil (1983-0023-1); Magnolia, 1920–40, oil (1983-0023-2); Spanish Woman, 1920–24, oil (1983-0023-3); and Espace, 1957–8, oil (1983-0023-4). While some of the paintings acquired were minor works by Goncharova’s standards, together with those already received from Tomilina, they display almost the full range of Goncharova’s styles and periods of creative development. They also extended the collection’s Modernist works beyond the limits of Western art practice into a very fertile period of East European Modernism.

Figure 6. 

Natalia Goncharova, Sunflowers and a Portrait, c. 1908–09, oil on canvas, 1072 × 1155 mm. Gift of Mme Larionov, Paris, 1973, Te Papa (1973-0003-3) © Natalia Goncharova. ADAGP/Copyright Agency, 2024.

These Goncharova paintings form the core of works by Russian or Russian-associated artists acquired for the NAG through Chamot. It began with the purchase of Sonia Delaunay’s Orphic gouache Groupe des femmes (1925) in 1966. Delaunay (née Sofiia Ilinishna Stern) was born in the south of Russia, later moving to St Petersburg before leaving for Germany and France, where she married the creator of Orphism, Robert Delaunay. Chamot’s gift of 1982–3 also included Aleksandr Benois’s Le vendeur de pain, d’epices et friandises. Petrouchka (1925) (1983-0023-12) a pen and ink costume design for the Copenhagen revival of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka in 1925, as well as Mstislav Dobuzhinsky’s watercolour and gouache design for the decoration of 1 Belgrave Square for the Exhibition of Russian Art, June-July 1935 (1983-0023-11). This was not only a fine work of art, but also a valuable document of that significant exhibition, from ancient to modern, the largest exhibition of Russian art in the West since the impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s ground-breaking “Two Centuries of the Russian art and Sculpture” in Paris in 1906.⁸⁵ In many ways, Chamot, like many immigrants, never left her country of origin in her mind. Her personal collection reflected the rich experience of her childhood and adolescence – she socialised with Russians living in London, her partner was Russian, she visited the Soviet Union many times, and on her trips to the United States she stayed with Russian friends.

The booklet Day proposed publishing in 1974 was finally published by his successor, Luit Bieringa, in 1987, with an introduction by Anne Kirker.⁸⁶ It accompanied an exhibition of the Goncharova paintings in the collection of the NAG, supported by Russian works from the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, and the Robert McDougall Gallery in Christchurch. The following year it travelled to Dunedin. The booklet contained an essay by Chamot, “A First-Hand Account of Natalia Goncharova and Comments on Three Early Paintings”, as well as this author’s “The Stylistic Development of Natalia Goncharova”.⁸⁷

Chamot resigned her position as London Representative of the NAG from 3 August 1977. She remained in her flat in Melbury Road, Kensington, until early 1983, when she sent works from her collection to the NAG.⁸⁸ After Chamot’s death in 1993, the NAG received a list from the lawyers administering her estate, detailing further works she had bequeathed to the gallery. These were held in trust by the Contemporary Art Society at the Tate Gallery. The NAG was able to make a selection from the works, with those not chosen remaining in the possession of the CAS.⁸⁹

The NAG selected eight of the twelve works bequeathed. One of these was Goncharova’s late eighteenth-early nineteenth century baptismal icon of the Kazan Mother of God and Christ Child (1994-0022-8). According to Chamot, this icon had accompanied Goncharova throughout her life, travelling in suitcases from one destination to another, until she settled in Paris in 1919, where it hung above her bed. It passed to Chamot after Goncharova’s death.⁹⁰

This final bequest also included an Old Master Drawing of the North Italian School, c. 1650, of a seated male nude (1994-0022-7), that joined Fabrizio Chiari’s ink and wash drawing of Saint Thomas of Villanova Distributing Alms, c. 1658 (1983-0023-13), finally fulfilling Melvin Day’s earlier request for Old Master drawings for use in his art history lectures. The bequest also included the Burne-Jones Italian sketchbook (1994-0022-2) admired by the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald.

Figure 7. 

Icon painting of the Kazan Mother of God and the Christ Child, oil and egg tempera on wooden panel, late 18^th or early 19^th century, bequest of Mary Chamot, 1994, Te Papa 1994-0022-8, bequest of Miss Mary Chamot, 1984.

These works demonstrate Chamot’s breadth of interest and aesthetic sensibility. It is this open-minded, but refined eclecticism that she also bequeathed to all who knew her and worked with her, and which she passed on to the directors and Committee of Management of the NAG. Her reputation and role also inspired the central character in Thomasin Sleigh’s 2018 novel, Women in the Field: One and Two (Lawrence and Gibson: Wellington).

Chamot greatly expanded the number of works by women artists in the collection. There is no evidence to indicate this was a deliberate policy, nor was it mentioned by either Maclennan or Day. Chamot never posed as a ‘feminist’, but she did have an extensive circle of woman artist friends and colleagues in London and France. Her friendship in Paris, for example, was focussed on Goncharova, rather than Larionov. She certainly championed Francis Hodgkins, both in Wellington and Auckland. In the London Museum scene Chamot was a fearless performer, perhaps because she was not English, not burdened by class and gender attitudes firmly fixed. It is this unpretentious but determined attitude that inspired Sleigh.

Figure 8. 

Seated male nude, circa 1650, brown ink on paper, 263 × 380 (Te Papa 1994-0022-7), bequest of Mary Chamot, 1994.

Chamot not only bought, bequeathed or gifted significant contemporary British works of art, but also extended the NAG’s collection into European Modernism, particularly with the splendid group of works by Goncharova, but also with works from periods and movements not previously represented in the collection of the NAG. The question remains, why did Chamot choose to gift such valuable and personal works to the NAG? When Anthony Parton asked Chamot, she replied:

The Tate have got sufficient and, anyway, if I left my collection to the Tate it would go into store and never be seen again—it would be locked away. So, I am sending everything to New Zealand. I used to be a picture buyer for New Zealand. It’s really important that people across the world can see works of Goncharova and at least the New Zealand paintings will get a chance to be seen.⁹¹

The engagement of representatives in London to advise on the purchase of works of art was not a phenomenon exclusive to Wellington or New Zealand.

Anne Kirker has pointed out that London-based advisers were used by many Australasian galleries to purchase British works of art in the early twentieth century, noting that “Often these advisers had little idea of conditions in Australasia and their knowledge of the existing collections was scant…These men [sic] were frequently academicians and unlikely to promote imagery which challenged the status quo”.⁹² Not all of them were men. For example, Chamot’s friend Mary Woodall, also a graduate of the Slade, later the formidable Keeper of Art at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, and eventually Museum Director, was the first woman to act as the London-based Felton Bequest Adviser for the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, from 1965–1974.^93,94

After Chamot’s resignation no further appointment was made of a London representative for the NAG. The official London-Wellington axis expired. A new generation of museum directors began to look to other cultural imperatives closer to “home”, to Polynesia, to Māori culture. New ideas of museology were in the air.⁹⁴ As Ken Gorbey put it, somewhat disparagingly, “the old gallery [NAG] occupied the upper floor of a reddish stone 1930s pile across town on the edge of the CBD twilight zone. Few visited…I began work with the director Luit Bieringa…Luit had brave ideas about art as contemporary life, contested ground, something all the better for being wrangled over. Our biggest societal debate at that time was the sovereign place of Māori within the nation”.⁹⁵ The Slade, Tonks, British art of the early twentieth century, all seemed anachronistic to a new generation, especially as the NAG, staff and collection, became integrated into the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Mary Chamot inherited an unenviable task from Thompson: to continue his foundations for a collection of art works worthy of the “National” sobriquet with meagre financial resources. From the beginning she put her experience as a gallery curator and as a friend of artists and art historians to good use. Chamot trusted her own aesthetic instincts: quality of execution, originality of mind, a challenge to the intellect and loyalty to tradition. These firm foundations did not include loyalty to a style, to an ideology, to any “ism”, period or place. She was not an adherent of Modernism as such, but neither was she set against “abstraction” or any other manifestation of what the Western World understood by all the varieties of Modernism. She was loyal to the good qualities she knew existed in Modernism—Surrealism, Orphism, Vorticism, Cubism, Expressionism, the British form of Modernism or Neo-Romanticism, as well as to the power of draughtsmanship, of painting and printmaking, of Old Master Drawings. She used her connections to get good, sometimes spectacular deals—such as Eileen Agar’s Woman Reading or the best of the Francis Hodgkins. She had no ego to flout: her career had flowered at the Tate, what she had learned there she brought to her recommendations for the NAG. She was generous with her gifts and bequests, modest as they were of necessity, for Chamot was not a rich woman. She was also aware that her contribution was not the only one embellishing the collection of the NAG at the time. There was also the quantity of prints donated by Sir John Illott. The generosity of Sir Rex Nan Kivell from the Redfern Gallery was prodigious – enriching the holdings of artists collected by both Thompson and Chamot.⁹⁶

It was Chamot who was largely responsible for Melvin Day’s appointment to succeed MacLennan, and it was Day who began to buy the New Zealand Modernists—Drawbridge in 1966, McCahon in 1967, Mrkusich in 1969 and Gordon Walters and Ralph Hotere in 1970, thus marking a turn, not against Modernism, not against the influence of Britain and the United States, but towards New Zealand-born practitioners who exhibited the sort of cosmopolitanism Chamot introduced. Her legacy was secure.

Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, ATL qMS HOD.

Te Papa Acquisition Files..

Te Papa Archives 1973/3/1/03.

Te Papa Archives MU 000009/009/00 23D 08.

Te Papa Archives MU000009/009/00 0/2.