Emily Cumming Harris was one of New Zealand"s first professional women painters.
Background
She was born in Plymouth, Devonshire, England on c.1837 but spent most of her life in Nelson, New Zealand. Harris was the daughter of Sarah Hill and her husband Edwin Harris. Her mother was a teacher who established a primary school in Taranaki.
Career
She chiefly painted New Zealand plants and flowers and worked mainly in water colour. The Harris family emigrated from England on the "William Bryan", a ship of the Plymouth Company of New Zealand. They reached New Zealand on 31 March 1841.
Harris subsequently became an assistant teacher at that school.
Following the outbreak of the First Taranaki War in March 1860, Harris was sent to Hobart to study while her family moved to Nelson. She continued to paint but sales of her work were never sufficient to allow her to give up teaching to concentrate on her art full-time.
Harris showed her work at exhibitions in New Zealand and overseas. In 1879 she exhibited at the Sydney International Exhibit where she was awarded a first degree of merit.
She also exhibited at the 1880 - 1881 Melbourne International Exhibition.
She was also awarded third prize for a painted table top. In 1886 she was commended for work at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London and in 1888 -1889 again exhibited in Melbourne at the Centennial International Exhibition. She also organised exhibits of her own work in Nelson, Wellington, New Plymouth and Stratford in 1889 and 1890, and again in New Plymouth in 1899.
In 1896 she exhibited at her studio in Nelson.
She completed a book entitled New Zealand Mountain Flowers in the 1890s which was never published. The Alexander Turnball Library purchased the manuscript in London in 1970.
Harris"s professional artistic development and success was constrained by family obligations, straitened finances and the conventions of her time. However, in 1924 the Alexander Turnbull Library purchased 63 of her water colours.
She continued to live and paint in the family home at Nile Street, Nelson, until her death aged 88, on 5 August 1925.