Frank Wesley: The Queensland years

A little-known piece of Queensland’s art history is that the Indian artist Frank Wesley lived and worked in Queensland for nearly thirty years. From Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Wesley completed his art studies in India, Japan and the United States. He won the competition to design the urn that would hold the ashes of Mahatma Gandhi and had paintings exhibited in the Vatican Museum in Rome in 1950. His Blue Madonna painting was reproduced on the first UNICEF Christmas card. Wesley spent the last third of his life in Nambour. While he may chiefly be considered a watercolourist in the Indian Lucknow style, his media and practice were far more diverse. This article seeks to provide a brief overview of the work achieved by Wesley over this time, featuring biblical and Christian themes, and also landscapes and figurative pieces in a wide range of media and styles from various traditions. Among these are styles that emerged in more distinctive ways during his Nambour years, including the incorporation of the human figure or the hand of God in the landscape after seeing Indigenous rock art, and also the contrasting designs for two stained-glass windows.

The Nineteenth Century

While Christmas was already a popular feast day at the start of the nineteenth century, the holiday was transformed and greatly expanded over the course of the Victorian age. One reason for this was that many Reformed and Dissenting Protestants went from opposing Christmas to celebrating it. Christians in the United States from Episcopalians to the Salvation Army also promoted the rise of Santa Claus as a surreptitious gift bearer. The holiday experienced a significant domestication: for many people Christmas was no longer primarily an open-air event, nor an ecclesial one, but one focused on home and family, especially children. The Christmas tree was a German Protestant tradition that become popular in numerous countries. The British gave the world the Christmas card. Finally, new forms of charity rose side-by-side with new forms of commercialism, as well as new forms of devotion such as the Lessons and Carols service.

“Messages of Love from Maoriland”: A. D. Willis’s New Zealand Christmas Cards and Booklets 1883-1893

I have previously explored the beginnings of the New Zealand Christmas card prior to 1883, and the ways that the designers of these cards negotiated the colonial experience of a summer Christmas.1 This paper examines the development, over the decade following 1883, of the chromolithographic work of A. D. Willis, whose production not only continued the work of creating a niche for New Zealand Christmas cards, but also tried to compete with the large overseas ‘art publishers’ who were flooding the New Zealand market with northern hemisphere iconography. Willis’s Christmas cards are frequently used to illustrate books looking at the 1880s, but there has been no detailed study done of them. The paper therefore documents the cards, their production and reception, explores how they record Willis’s understanding of the art publishing business and the market he was working into, and situates them in relation to broader print culture. Understanding this overlooked chapter in ‘commercial art’ provides useful evidence of the murky interplay between the local, national and transnational identities that marked New Zealand cultural production when artists and designers sought to capture the public’s Yuletide sentiments. Willis’s work also displays two very distinct conceptions of how to represent what was increasingly known as ‘Maoriland’ to an overseas market – one focused on the land, and the other on Māori. As such, these cards act as a weathervane for what the New Zealand public accepted as New Zealand, artistic and appropriate as a Christmas gift.