Life, sometime after the horse was harnessed
Steph: PAST FAMILY preface
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Books pertaining to family. MTG storeroom. Napier. 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.
Tiffen villa and a church.
Excerpt 1. The church was St Mary's Catholic Church. (now demolished)
Excerpt from a painting by J. Annabell, commissioned by Henry Stokes Tiffen.
1. ' New Zealand Views.' is a brief photographic cluster of splendors. All the photos in the book are of landforms, streams and rocks except for one of humans in a domestic landscape. The photograph showing humans is this. It is people and a villa with a park reserve of trees behind them. The house is below Napier Hill. the park was surveyed by Henry Tiffen.
Cited as ‘Tiffen House’ the identity of the figures represented is marked as ‘unknown’. There is a church in the second image on that page. The church, painted, is seen here on the right edge of the Chapman painting.
The women are posed playing/learning 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 is described to be a form of game play between the sexes in public having recreationally begun.
2. The commissioned oil paintingI had seen a coloured postcard of Annabell’s oil in my Aunty Priscilla's house in 1976. I was surprised to realize that it was a print of a painting in oils. Then I deduced that it was a memento image to her. I travelled to Napier from Christchurch in 2021 to track down the original painting.
'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 figures represented are his sister-in-law, Lucy, and her three daughters visiting Louisa. Louisa White had married Henry Tiffen in 1855 in London. In the painting she is dressed in mid 19th Century white. Lucy is painted as the woman in blue. Lucy is a representation with her three daughters. The real family of brown- haired girls are all painted as blonds in this interpretation.
Henry appointed acres to be parkland for the town called Napier, of 1855.
Henry's villa was cleared for the building of the Municipal Theater after he died.
Footsteps and a path up through the small parkland of trees on Napier Hill still exist today.
Oil by Artist/surveyor J. Annabell. MTG. Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2021.
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Two photographs. New Zealand Views. MTG. Hawkes Bay.
Photograph by Stephanie Beth. 2021
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. MTG.Napier. 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 of Alfred Chapman's sketchbook.
I title this ' hors d oeuvres '
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 1858.
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 thoughts
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.