George O'Brien
1822 to 1888
The reputation of O'Brien has, undeservedly, failed to extend far beyond Dunedin; he is a painter of more than local interest and parochial stature.
E.H. McCormick, 1954.
Mr O'Brien has pictures everywhere on the walls, all shapes and sizes, and all more or less disagreeable.
The Saturday Advertiser, 1876.
R.D.J. COLLINS
It is indicative of the relative youth of art historical research in New Zealand that the biography of George O'Brien - widely recognized as a major figure since 1940 at least - should still remain so full of legend and imprecision. The earliest 'modern' biographical source is a letter written in 1944, almost sixty years after the artist's death, by a son of the friends with whom O'Brien lived for the last years of his life. The earliest extended published text on him appears to be in a 1945 exhibition catalogue.
All available evidence points to his being the son of Admiral Robert O'Brien R.N. (1766-1838) - not however the fourth son as is generally stated but the fifth - born at Dromoland Castle, County Clare, in 1822. He was thus the grandson of a baronet, and through him a direct descendant of a dynasty of Irish kings. Moreover he was first cousin to the thirteenth Lord Inchiquin who succeeded to that title in 1855. The claim has been made, without any supporting evidence, that George O'Brien received part of his education in Germany. The records of Rugby School and the University of Oxford contain no trace of O'Brien among their former students, in contradiction of the traditional New Zealand view. Two scenes Near Ashover, Derbyshire, exhibited in Dunedin in 1879, should be recorded at this point as possible evidence of O'Brien's life in the British Isles, especially in the absence of more reliable documentation.
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GEORGE O'BRIEN Otago Landscape with Buildings watercolour (collection of Dr Neville Hogg, Dargaville) |
O'Brien's Australian career is less speculative. Whether or not he did in fact arrive in Victoria in 1837 when he would have been only fifteen years old, as has been stated, it would appear that he was in Melbourne by 1839, the date attributed to two unsigned and undated views of that town, in the La Trobe collection of the Victorian State library. This tenuous evidence is somewhat strengthened by the illustrious provenance of the works, which were the gift of the Hon. J.P. Fawkner, to whom is generally accorded the honour of having founded Melbourne in 1835. Three further Melbourne views in the same collection, one of them part of the Hon. J.P. Fawkner's gift and all equally bereft of date and signature but attributed to O'Brien and 1840, would confirm his presence in Victoria. In 1851 O'Brien was elected an associate of the Victorian Architects Association, a fact of considerable importance in the light of much of his later work. In 1853 he married at Saint James's Church, Melbourne, Jane Mashford, born in Devonshire, England, nineteen years earlier. Three dated watercolours of views near Melbourne, now in the Sate Library of Victoria, and two others in the William Dixson Gallery, Sydney, confirm his continued presence in Australia in 1861 and 1862.
What is perhaps the only Australian work of O'Brien in New Zealand, An Out Station in Victoria, attempts to present within limited dimensions an epic landscape of a type he was to handle with more ease and on a larger scale when working in and around Dunedin. On the other hand, the painstakingly handled foreground details, paralleled in certain of his Dunedin views both in watercolour and pencil, are symptomatic both of the close scrutiny of his subjects and the almost visionary quality which marks his best work, and also of the mechanical formulae typical of his less successful pictures.
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| GEORGE O'BRIEN Dunedin from Driver's Road 1886 pencil and chinese white, 25 x 30 cm. (collection of The Hocken Library) |
The precise dates of his departure from Australia and his arrival in Otago are still unknown, but 'O'Brien George Duncan Street' enters the record on 3 December 1863 when, at a special meeting of the Dunedin Town Board, he was admitted to the ratepayers' roll. A dated view of Port Chalmers is further evidence of his presence in Otago in that year. Thereafter, his residence in Dunedin can be confirmed with only a few gaps, and his successive charges of address followed through electoral rolls and town directories. He continued to live in a three-roomed dwelling in Duncan Street - on the hill above but close to the town's commercial centre, - probably until 1865. In 1866 he was living further north, in Heriot Row, apparently on the present site of S. Hilda's School, and was still there in 1868.
Then follows a gap, and O'Brien is next found living at the bottom of Park Street in 1870-71. A year later he was in Castle Street, remaining there until 1875-76. An address in Leith Street in 1878, where he was still living in June 1879 when his wife died, one in Great King Street, in 1884, another in Clyde Street in 1885, and then a final listing in Cumberland Street in 1888, the year of his death, are all that has been unearthed concerning O'Brien's homes during the last years of his life. This succession of addresses, after 1870 all in a working class area of the city, suggests a gradual decline in O'Brien's material situation.
The claim made in an obituary that O'Brien came to Dunedin as an assistant to the City Engineer, can be neither proved nor disproved. He was however a member of the Engineer's Department in July 1864, one of the three employees remaining after economy measures led to the dismissal of four other officers. This respite was short-lived for the Town Clerk wrote to O'Brien on 3 November of the same year, dismissing him from the 30th of that month' . . . as it is found necessary to reduce the current expenses of the Town Board. . .' A second letter of dismissal, dated 1 March 1865 and taking effect from 31 May, and a newspaper reference of October 1865 to O'Brien being in the City Surveyor's Department, indicate at least two other periods of employment by the municipality. This was perhaps his true vocation, for he described himself as a Civil Engineer all his life.
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| GEORGE O'BRIEN East Taieri Presbyterian Church, 1869 watercolour 40 x 50 cm. (collection of the Hocken Library) |
Perhaps in response to this professional instability, O'Brien had already made contact with the architectural firm established by William Mason and W.H. Clayton in 1863. Of the perspective drawings he did for them, only two have been identified, one for the new Dunedin Post Office (later the Stock Exchange), and one for the Colonial Museum, Wellington, commissioned from the architects in 1865. When Clayton left this initial partnership in 1868, prior to his appointment as Colonial Architect in 1869, he maintained contact with O'Brien to whom was entrusted the preparation of a perspective drawing of the new Government House.
O'Brien's association with Mason continued however, and in May 1872 the new firm of Mason and Wales employed him to prepare a drawing of proposals for the projected Knox Church, George Street, Dunedin. In the same year Mason paid O'Brien £2.10s. for drawings of another proposed church, in Queenstown. Neither of these drawings appears now to exist.
R.A. Lawson was another distinguished Dunedin architect who made use of O'Brien's skill. The earliest dated work O'Brien did for him that has been located is an 1868 perspective drawing of First Church (the church itself was completed in 1873), but there are other drawings from Lawson's plans for the East Taieri Presbyterian Church (1869), the Otago Boys' High School and the Seacliff Hospital (both 1883), as well as a curious composite picture of various buildings designed by Lawson.
To this catalogue of primarily technical drawings must be added those works which appear as tentative explorations of townscape painting. Gibson Turton's house in Constitution Street (undated) and a row of houses in an unidentified street (1869), to mention only two examples, point to what is O'Brien's greatest originality in New Zealand painting, his view of a growing city imposing new forms and a new pattern of life on a land still unfamiliar and daunting to an immigrant eye.
Teaching was a further potential source of income. Advertisements offering 'instruction to a limited number of pupils in the Art of Drawing and Painting, in all its branches' appeared in the Otago Daily Times in October and November 1867, and it has been stated that A.W. Walsh was among O'Brien's pupils. Three lithographs drawn by O'Brien after J. T. Thomson and A. Hamilton, illustrating Vincent Pyke's book The Province of Otago in New Zealand published in Dunedin in 1868, may be evidence of an attempt to supplement his income in another direction.
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| GEORGE O'BRIEN The Waitati Valley, with Sketching Party pencil and chinese white, 23 x 28 cm. (private collection) |
Apart from architectural commissions, no evidence has been found of any pictures dating from the period 1871-1875. All the dated works sighted up to and including 1870 are of Dunedin or of its region, ranging from Waikouaiti in the north to the Taieri in the south. Many are on a broad scale, setting the landscape, in itself awe-inspiring enough, in a vast and lonely expanse of sea or sky. Most display the meticulous draughtsmanship expected of a civil engineer and seen most clearly in two unfinished preparatory drawings in the Hocken Library. Colours are often strong (a point occasionally criticized by contemporary critics) especially in the foregrounds, with aerial perspective intervening in the middle and far distance. Certain compositional and technical devices, firmly established in these early works, reappear later in his career: a predilection for a high foreground and a plunging view, so marked that when topography does not provide it, a shift in viewpoint may be introduced part-way up the picture; a tree or flax bush in the left or right foreground; the 'spotty' handling of foreground foliage in the water-colours, a technique impossible to apply in the pencil drawings which are thereby saved from what sometimes becomes a trite, mechanical cliché.
Works by O'Brien were exhibited twice in 1865. Although the Official Catalogue for the 1865 New Zealand Exhibition does not list him, an anonymous correspondent for The Wellington Independent warmly praises one of O'Brien's views of Port Chalmers. The same writer senses O'Brien's hand in a perspective drawing of the Exhibition building itself, now lost, exhibited by Mason and Clayton, but overlooks a further drawing we know to be by O'Brien, the 'Design for Post Office, Dunedin'. In October of the same year a view of the harbour from the hills to the south of the city was displayed in a George Street shop.
Ten years later there emerged new possibilities for the public exhibition of his work. George O'Brien was present at the inaugural meeting of the Otago Art Society and was elected both to the Society's Council and to the three-man selection committee for the first annual exhibition, opened in November 1876. In general terms, this exhibition was an event hailed enthusiastically and at sometimes great length by Dunedin's four anonymous newspaper critics. More specifically, it would have been difficult to overlook O'Brien's own contribution - 28 of the 148 works catalogued.
The sharpest comment appeared in The Saturday Advertiser:
Mr O'Brien has pictures everywhere on the walls, all shapes and sizes, and all more or less disagreeable. His trees never grew. They look just as if, well- as if made by Mr O'Brien. Take No.9 as an instance, "The Silver Peaks". In the foreground of this picture you will see trees. What a labour has been bestowed on them, and what are they? Front elevations of something, or nothing. Mr O'Brien has one picture, No.87, "Waikouaiti Bay". Here is a splendid sheet of water, beautifully painted, clear and sweet. This is really good, and his best exhibit. There are neither wooden trees nor hills in this.
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| GEORGE O'BRIEN Mount Charles, Otago Peninsula from the Camp 1867 watercolour (collection of The Hocken Library) |
The Otago Daily Times was more sober in its comments. Snow on Flagstaff was described as 'wonderful for its fidelity to the characteristics of rugged Otago mountain scenery. (...) the interminable gullies, gorges, and ridges common to this country are admirably painted,' a response typical of the widespread favorable reaction to the manner of John Gully, and out of sympathy with a less romantic, more lucid vision. One such unromantic work by O'Brien was Dunedin, in 1869, taken from the junction, described by this reviewer as
a remarkably accurate record map of everything the eye could include at that date: houses, roads, clumps of bush, clearings and even individual trees seem to have been recorded with the most painstaking accuracy. Indeed the beholder might with very little effort imagine himself on the spot with the view before him. This accuracy is, however, quite destructive of artistic effect, but a few centuries hence the record will prove interesting.
The aesthetic attitudes implicit in this criticism also explain reticences concerning The Silver Peaks which had already drawn the sarcasm of the Saturday Advertiser: 'True, it might not be absolutely incorrect were the artist drawing for a botanical cabinet; but here, as in most of Mr O'Brien's work, the painful detail results in trees such as were never seen.' Apart from the validity or otherwise of the fundamental ideas here implied, the manifest contradiction leaves one perplexed.
The Evening Star was kinder, praising his draughtmanship, expressing some reservations over his colouring, and waxing lyrical on some pencil drawings: 'Seldom is so great excellence attained in the use of the black-lead pencil. They will bear the closest inspection and most rigid criticism.' Warm but superficial comments appeared in the Otago Guardian.
The Otago Art Society exhibition probably marks the peak of O'Brien's career. At no other time were so many of his works shown together, at no other time did he receive so much attention from his contemporary critics, and at no other time did he enjoy the prestige which saw him elected to the Society's Council and to its selection committee. Although he remained a councillor until 1878, and a working member until 1879, he exhibited only two more works in the 'seventies both English landscapes lent to the 1879 exhibition. Four Dunedin papers noticed them, their comments ranging from 'very pretty. .. carefully finished and highly effective' (Evening Star), through the Otago Daily Times's ambiguous observation that they 'scarcely need our praise', to the Morning Herald's condemnation of the subjects as 'not very interesting.'
There is no evidence of O'Brien having exhibited with the Otago Art Society from 1880 to 1885: nor in fact was he a working member in that period. He did however show three works with the Canterbury Society of Arts, one probably in 1884 and two in 1886: he appears as a working member in that society's catalogue for 1887, when he exhibited nothing.
Meanwhile, he rejoined the Otago society in 1886 and showed four works, including for the first time a more distant subject, Mount Aspiring. Three newspapers which reviewed the exhibition passed over O'Brien's contributions in unanimous silence. W.M. Hodgkins's praise of 'MrGully, the father of New Zealand art' in his opening address is indicative of the entrenched and dominant taste and may explain, in some measure, O'Brien's fall in esteem.
In 1887, the last year in which he exhibited, O'Brien showed ten works, ranging from Fiordland and the Southern Lakes to the Rotorua region. The Otago Daily Times mentions him only in a list of works sold (St. Clair Heads, £ 1.10.0); the Evening Star comments in particular on his pencil drawings 'which are quite perfect in their way'; and the Evening Herald makes specific, laudatory mention of two drawings (Blueskin Bay, On the Leith) and a landscape, St. Clair Heads, 'which. . . may be singled out as a particularly meritorious work.'
One may doubtless assume that O'Brien found some personal friendships within the Art Society which a survey of catalogues and newspaper reports cannot reveal. Two unsigned O'Brien watercolours found in a portfolio belonging to W.M. Hodgkins suggest group sketching excursions and the companionable exchange of works. L.W. Wilson was a personal friend, and A.H. O'Keeffe wrote warmly in 1940 of his recollections of O'Brien, but beyond that, the latter's relationships in Dunedin's artistic community can not be more clearly defined.
O'Brien was first and foremost a Dunedin painter, finding a wide variety of subjects within a limited area. The earliest firm evidence of travel elsewhere in New Zealand is a view of Milford Sound dated 1884. Thereafter dated works record visits to the Southern Alps, Fiordland and the North Island, certain of them exhibited in Dunedin in 1886 and 1887. The available evidence makes it impossible to deduce the number or the precise dates of his excursions further afield (save that he was in the North Island after the Tarawera eruption of June 1886). These more 'exotic' works betray a failing of his powers, with vast expanses of insensitively applied wash, topographical distortions devoid of the naive charm and expressive power of Heaphy's Mount Egmont or Buchanan's Milford Sound, and a loss of the intimate vision which gives his best works so much of their merit. A new trick appears - heavy applications of opaque white for snow (one regrets not being able to make comparisons with the snowscape praised in the 1876 exhibition). A small undated lake and mountain scene, akin in colour and tone to the 1884 Milford Sound landscape, but flaccid in its drawing, suggests that he may have done rapid works on the spot with the intention of working from them later, at leisure. A large, clearly unfinished view of a church and graveyard at Ohinemutu shows that the engineer's and architect's hand could still draw with assurance, but an over-strict application of rules of perspective, untempered by the sensitivity one could have taken for granted in earlier pictures, destroys it as a work of art.
Jane O'Brien had died in 1879, survived by her husband and their five daughters. One source suggests there was no communication between them and their father in the last years of his life. From about 1884, O'Brien lived with Henry Divers, of fluctuating profession and frequently changing abode, and it was to Mrs Mary Anne Divers that O'Brien left all his possessions when he drew up his will in June 1887. The witnesses were James Abernethy, brother of Mrs Divers, and James H. Wilkinson, related to the Abernethys by marriage, all of them much younger than O'Brien himself. This pattern of relationship and acquaintance suggests that late in life O'Brien created another circle of friends who were a second family to him. His health may have been bad - an embarrassingly whining letter written to a client, dated 1868 although 1888 is more probably, mentions the great pain he was suffering and the imminent purchase of medicine from the druggist. Moreover, tradition has it that he was an alcoholic - a grand-daughter of Henry and Mary Anne Divers recalls hearing of how O'Brien would exchange a picture for a drink. He died on 30 August 1888 of a heart complaint from which he had suffered for ten years, and erysipelas of the legs, which had first afflicted him only five days earlier, and was buried on 1 September 1888 in Dunedin's Northern Cemetery, at the expense of the Divers family. His grave is unmarked.
Less than two weeks before his death, O'Brien had completed a large view of Dunedin from the north end of the Southern Cemetery. Commissioned by a local publisher for reproduction, it sums up much of the artist's work. In a long description of the painting, the Otago Witness said that 'this necessary attention to detail has not been allowed in any way to fetter the artist. There is nothing at all cramped or artificial about the work which, while accurately portraying the city and its surroundings, has all the breadth and freedom of the ordinary landscape.' Townscape and landscape, a broad view and detailed observation, draughtsmanship and the judicious eye of a skilled watercolourist - all of these qualities and preoccupations, common to O'Brien's work as a whole, are gathered together in his last work, 'by no means the least important of his water-colours' (Evening Star), superior to most other late works which have been identified, and of which the published chromolithograph was expected to 'command a ready sale, especially as it will represent the best work of an artist whose productions are well and favourably known in this city' (Otago Witness).
The reason or reasons for George O'Brien's departure from Europe for Australia and then, over twenty-five years later, for New Zealand, may never be known. His best work appears to date from the mid 'sixties to the mid 'seventies, and its quality was perhaps not wholly unrelated to the status he obviously enjoyed in the Dunedin art world at that time. His reputation was still high in 1879 - the newspaper critics counted him among the 'professionals' - but his 'fall from grace' had already begun. The more acerbic criticisms expressed in 1876 may have heralded its beginning, and the periods of 'silence' may confirm it, as does the quality of many of his latest works. Material problems and ill health perhaps played their part in this decline. A photograph of him in the Otago Early Settlers' Association museum does not show a happy man, although A.H. O'Keeffe's recollections of a jovial person give this interpretation the lie. In any case, our attention is thus redirected to the fact that, although O'Brien's biography and his qualities as a painter become clearer, the personality behind this public image still remains a mystery.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 3 December/January 1976-77