Constance Gordon-Cumming

In 2025, Te Papa acquired four watercolours by the nineteenth-century British artist Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming (1837–1924). Over summer, art history lecturer Dr Victoria Munn, and student and artist, Catherine Shone, brought new light to bear on Gordon-Cumming’s artistic practice and process. Constance Gordon-Cumming (1837–1924) was a Scottish-born writer and artist. She was described by her contemporary, English writer William Henry Davenport Adams, as having ‘put a girdle about the world with unfailing ardour.’[[i]]( Little is known about Gordon-Cumming’s education or training, but, having grown up in an artistic upper-class household, she was exhibiting works at the Royal Academy of Scotland and the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts by the 1860s. Gordon-Cumming’s love of travel was sparked when she visited her sister in India in 1868, followed by expeditions in Asia, America and the South Pacific. She represents a group of women, referred to in their day as “globe trotteresses”, who undertook extensive travel in the nineteenth century, many of whom engaged with faraway lands by sketching and painting scenes they encountered or writing accounts of their travels. Indeed, Gordon-Cumming produced lively and detailed paintings of the landscapes she encountered across the world and, upon her return to Scotland in the early 1880s, she published several travel books recounting her experiences.[[ii]]( After extensive travels in India and Ceylon, Gordon-Cumming spent several years in the South Pacific. In 1875, she accompanied the first British Governor of Fiji, Sir Arthur Gordon and his wife, Rachel Hamilton Gordon, on a trip from England to Fiji and spent the following year travelling around the Fijian islands. Gordon-Cumming then spent the first few months of 1877 in New Zealand, travelling to Kawau Island, the Coromandel, Rotorua, Wairoa, and Auckland. Her time in Fiji and New Zealand is recounted in detail in one of her published travel accounts, At Home in Fiji (1881), and some of the paintings Gordon-Cumming produced of New Zealand scenery are held in the collections of the Alexander Turnbull Library and Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki . Gordon-Cumming was then invited aboard a French man-of-war that was travelling around the South Pacific at the service of the Bishop of Sāmoa. She visited Tonga, Sāmoa and Tahiti, and again her experiences and observations were recorded in print and in paint.[[iii]]( Two of Te Papa’s recently acquired watercolours, painted by Gordon-Cumming in late 1877, depict the South Pacific island of Mo‘orea. Given her travels in New Zealand and the South Pacific and impressive resulting watercolours, Constance Gordon-Cumming featured as a case study in the Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington Art History course, ‘Topic in Aotearoa New Zealand Art: Women and Art, c . 1880–1940’. The course was developed and taught by the 2025 Oroya and Melvin Day Fellow in New Zealand Art History, Dr Victoria Munn. Thanks to Te Papa’s paper conservator Louise Newdick and collection manager Andrea Hearfield, an extra-curricular trip to Te Papa’s conservation lab also gave Catherine the opportunity to inspect Gordon-Cumming’s watercolours more closely. The four Constance Gordon-Cumming watercolours recently acquired by Te Papa are displayed for VUW Art History students in Te Papa’s conservation lab. Photo by Catherine Shone Gordon-Cumming’s 1904 autobiography, Memories, provided invaluable first-hand evidence of her painting technique and made clear to Catherine the demands Gordon-Cumming must have experienced when painting in the Pacific. Gordon-Cumming boasts completing “upwards of a hundred very interesting large pictures” on a yearlong journey across India—an output only possible through a confident, highly disciplined method. She also describes beginning with precise pencil outlines before laying in colour at speed.[[iv]]( Catherine’s reconstruction of the first watercolour layers o