Life, sometime after the horse was harnessed.
Steph: preface for chapterS 1 & 2
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Books pertaining to family. MTG. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2021
Above.
On the left is a book of water colours by Alfred Chapman. (1828 - 1874)
On the right is a book ' New Zealand Views '. It is black and white photographs of rocks, trees and rivers except that there is one photo of people on a lawn in front of a villa, marked. c1862. Also, there is an image of the church, painted to be seen here.
The photograph is cited as ‘Tiffen House’ the identity of the figures represented as ‘unknown’. There is a church in the second image on that page.
Excerpt 1. The right-hand edge of the painting is St Mary's Catholic Church. (now demolished) Excerpt from a painting by J. Annabell, commissioned by Henry Stokes Tiffen.
Tiffen House and Original St Paul's Church.
1. The photograph in ' New Zealand Views.'
The women are posed playing croquet. Croquet was already an important sport. It was the first English sport, I understand, for mixed sexes. One dubious start was the proposition that women might cheat with ball under a skirt! However,note that this game the idea of play between the sexes in public had recreationally begun.
2. The oil painting I had seen a coloured postcard of Annabell’s oil (above) in my Aunty Priscilla's house in 1976. I was surprised to realize that it was a print of a painting in oils. It was a memento image to her. I travelled to Napier from Christchurch in 2021 to track down the original painting.
In the photograph book ' New Zealand Views.' sits as a photographic timeline curiosity. All the photos are of landforms, streams and rocks except for the one of humans. in a domestic landscape. Thus, ‘Tiffen House’ with people is a photo showing the humans. A park reserve of trees is behind them in the image. The house is below Napier Hill, the park which had been surveyed by Henry, a horticulturalist and entrepreneur. 'Tiffen House' Henry and Louisa Tiffen’s residence in 1875 became a study in oil by an artist/surveyor, J. Annabell at the MTG. Napier, completed around 1876. The work was commissioned by great Uncle Henry. The figures represented are his sister-in-law, my Great grandmother Lucy and her three daughters visiting her sister in-law Louisa. Louisa had married Henry Tiffen, Fred's (my great grandfather oldest brother), in 1855 in London. In the painting Louisa is dressed in mid 19th Century white. Lucy is painted as the woman in blue. The mother image is a representation with her three daughters. The real family of brown- haired girls are all painted as blonds in this interpretation. The setting is looking at the villa and family on Tennyson Street with the Napier Hill beyond. Henry, the district surveyor, had appointed acres there to be parkland in his survey of the town called Napier, of 1855.
In the photograph book ' New Zealand Views.' sits as a photographic timeline curiosity. All the photos are of landforms, streams and rocks except for the one of humans. in a domestic landscape. Thus, ‘Tiffen House’ with people is a photo showing the humans. A park reserve of trees is behind them in the image. The house is below Napier Hill, the park which had been surveyed by Henry, a horticulturalist and entrepreneur. 'Tiffen House' Henry and Louisa Tiffen’s residence in 1875 became a study in oil by an artist/surveyor, J. Annabell at the MTG. Napier, completed around 1876. The work was commissioned by great Uncle Henry. The figures represented are his sister-in-law, my Great grandmother Lucy and her three daughters visiting her sister in-law Louisa. Louisa had married Henry Tiffen, Fred's (my great grandfather oldest brother), in 1855 in London. In the painting Louisa is dressed in mid 19th Century white. Lucy is painted as the woman in blue. The mother image is a representation with her three daughters. The real family of brown- haired girls are all painted as blonds in this interpretation. The setting is looking at the villa and family on Tennyson Street with the Napier Hill beyond. Henry, the district surveyor, had appointed acres there to be parkland in his survey of the town called Napier, of 1855.
Oil by Artist/surveyor J. Annabell. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2021.
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George Monteith and his wife Elizabeth's first two daughters married men in Elsthorpe. Lucy Monteith to Frederick Tiffen and Lizzie Monteith to Alfred Chapman. Both of them during 1859.
Alfred and his brother William Chapman came out from England and bought and farmed land that ran down to the Mangakuri river mouth in Central Hawkes Bay. Alfred became well known for his his ink pen sketching in his nom de plume, Steelpen. Chapman' illustrated diaries are stored at the MTG. Napier.
Over on the other side of the hill and trees in this image of the cow at the Chapmans at Edenham, is where Frederick began a farming life at Elmshill for his family.
Photographs of a Chapman sketchbook. by Stephanie Beth. 2021
Watercolours by Alfred Chapman of Edenham. NZ and Edenham parent family home England c 1847
The Hinemahanga Rocks. English locals named these The Three Bears. Here, the river outlet for Mangakuri River, a swimming hole for children over several generations.
a page corner snippet. I title this ' hors d ourves '
Alfred Chapman sketches: Departing Plymouth, first house with cow, Their parent's
Edenham, England; label about the stream and adjoining Māori whenua. Brother Frederick Chapman's ' mill to make bread from flour from Otane.
Above, is a sketch fragment in a corner of a page that I selected.
Cocktail party, Plymouth barracks. England.
Frederick John Tiffen. (1828 - 1911) visits the second Monteith daughter, Lucy. (1839 - 2010). Dixon Street. Wellington. c 858.
The photograph was taken by George Dalrymple Monteith at the family home on Dixon Street in 1858. George Monteith, father of Lucy, when just a baby under one, with his wife and three other siblings, had arrived at Port Nicholson to live in New Zealand on February 8, 1840, as a doctor.
The visit of Charles Tiffen Jnr and his wife Suzanne in 1959 to Elmshill and Kairakau, to New Zealand from Paris, opened up my imagination to cultural script about my ancestors. Charles, dad and aunty all had the same grandad. Charles represented another strand of family as business folk. His dad, Charles Hart senior, had married Carmilina from Italy. Charles, was in Italian Riviera Real Estate. (See Charles as a four-year-old with his parents and Aunt on holiday in Paris)
My mother and her creativity
the fine point
the fine line
culture as transmission
The Beatrice Cenci Opera
My mother gave me a doll in 1952. Its eyelids opened and shut.
In 2025 I rediscovered it packed away in the ceiling rafters at Eveleyn Couzins Avenue. (There are no attics in this country)
When I walked with my astonishing doll, she was waist height to me in 1952. I walked with her in all innocence and amazement.
Photograph 2025.
Seeing it seventy -three years later was impressively creepy. I immediately
thought about a contemporary opera Beatrice Cenci. (1949) (SONY 2 CD. SET 1995). by Berthold Goldschmidt. I had bought a world premiere recording of the opera in three acts, 1995 in 1999 (1).
Within days I briefly arranged a mirroring with the SONY CD publication cover image of that digital recording. The illustration gave me the creeps too. I posed the doll on my garden gravel.
Something about the score, written in 1949 by Goldschmidt, in the 1980's, crept over me as a force. The Cenci story is set in Rome. It was an horrific Renaissance tragedy involving patricide.
I felt it important to somehow acknowledge emotions and history with this. The composer Goldschmidt had not written new material for twenty-five years after he had fled to England in 1935, after the annexation of Austria and after the Gestapo interrogated his work. He only conducted from after 1980. This piece is an important late B. Goldschmidt artwork. It premiered in England in 1988 (2)
Only now in Italy 2025, a new law about femicide has just passed. (3) The holocaust is referenced by Berthold Goldschmidt. (4)
I had wished to visit Rome. The chance came when I saw the announcement of the Forever Godard Conference in 2001. I would go there upon leaving London.
After making US AND THE GAME INDUSTRY (2013), I perused the new literatures about collapse.
My first title for this writing, in 2021 was,
Waves blood and the jetstream a book in 2024
for the topic of the slowing of the major Jetstream in the Atlantic is a BIG topic. *
I could tie Physics to DNA to the ocean in a huge scoop. Enter center stage, then, was the mobius loop, Tim Morton on ecology, as a pivotal writer of the post-modern, including
his famous touch with Queen Mab**, and I didn't even have a complete works of Shakespeare until I bought a volume at the local market. So, I needed time.
I did the Art Bite talks, meanwhile.
* The Amok was being talked about in Scientific circles big time by 2017. CORRECTIVES.CO.NZ/NOTES
David buys the daily bread, Christchurch 2022.
References
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** Morton's Queen Mab referenced later.