Description
An Artist’s Daughter: With Christopher Perkins in New Zealand 1929–34 (published in 1986) is a humorous, affectionate biographical memoir written by Jane Garrett. The book details her teenage years navigating New Zealand society during the Great Depression alongside her eccentric, immigrant English family and her father, the prominent modernist painter Christopher Perkins.
Core Narrative
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- The Voyage Out: At thirteen years old, Garrett and her close-knit family sail on the Ruahine from England to New Zealand. Her father has secured a position as an Art Instructor at the Wellington Technical College.
- Cultural Culture Shock: Arriving with romanticized expectations of finding a “temperate Tahiti,” Christopher Perkins famously laments that he has instead discovered “a strip of Victorian England”. The family must quickly adapt to what they perceive as a highly conservative, isolated cultural backwater.
- Adventures in the Depression: Rather than a dry art critique, the book serves as Garrett’s lighthearted personal record of her family’s social misadventures, financial navigation, and warm encounters with everyday New Zealanders during the lean years of the 1930s Depression.
Key Subjects & Artistic Impact
- Clashing with the Establishment: The memoir logs the inevitable tension between the highly outspoken, modernist Perkins and the rigid, amateur artistic establishment of the era, notably the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts.
- Creative Inspiration: Despite his social frustrations, Perkins becomes deeply captivated by the unique, sharp Pacific light, the dramatic shapes of the local landscape, and the Māori people of Rotorua. The book details how this setting drove him to produce some of his most defining, historically significant masterpieces.
- Intellectual Friendships: It charts the family’s deep social ties to liberal, open-minded local academics at Victoria College who supported Perkins’s work, including prominent psychologist Ivan Sutherland and eccentric chemistry professor Philip Robertson.
Paperback. First-Edition. 192 Pages. Very-Good Condition.
