The model for the painting Tess was reputed to be Alice Jones, aged 16, at her father’s farm in Pauahatanui, New Zealand. The artist, James M Nairn, proposed to her when she was 18, but she rejected him as being, at 36,too old. By calling his painting Tess, Nairn has recast her as the eponymous heroine of Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles, imbuing her with the pastoral innocence of the central character early in the novel.
Study of light
Despite the literary title, Nairn’s real subject seems to be the study of light, atmosphere, and colour. The work is typical of his paintings of rural outdoor scenes. The figure of Tess is given minimal prominence and functions as a feature of the landscape in the same way as the cows, trees, cottage, and grasses. Nairn creates a pervading sense of sunlight with his broken brushwork, ‘spotlit’ whites, and contrasts of warm and cool tones.
Glasgow boy
Nairn trained in Scotland and was associated with the progressive Glasgow school of painters, the Glasgow Boys. He used a modified form of French Impressionism. Thisinvolved more subdued colours andmore regulated brush strokes, buthe still sought to capture the immediacy of outdoor light, particularly the effect of strong sunlight on outdoor forms.
New Zealand years
Nairn emigrated to New Zealand in 1890 for health reasons and taught at the Wellington Technical College. He broughtmuch needed freshness and vitality to New Zealand painting. He exhibited with the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts but, in 1892, dissatisfied with this institution, he formed the Wellington Art Club.
Nairn had a significant impact on New Zealand painting. He was a firm believer in the plein air style of painting, which involved working outdoors, directly from nature. He urged his followers to ‘to paint the thing as one sees it’. In an 1892 lecture, he said, ‘If we want art we must begin at the point where all great artists have begun. The study of nature from life or outside.’ In 1894, Nairn rented Pumpkin Cottage at Silverstream, not far from Wellington, which became a favourite meeting place for artists interested in outdoor painting.
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When the Scottish-born artist James McLauchlan Nairn arrived in Wellington in 1890, he brought with him first-hand experience of a cosmopolitan avant-garde practice to a colonial art scene in need of invigoration. Previously a member of the Glasgow Boys, a group that broke away from romantic landscape painting in favour of an impressionistic approach, Nairn encouraged local artists to work ‘en plein air’ (in the open air), to pay attention to the ordinary, to work in bold colours and to privilege the sketch over the more conventionally finished painting.
Tess was exhibited at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in 1893. Nairn’s large-scale oil painting takes its subject from Thomas Hardy’s 1892 novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and depicts the heroine, Tess, at one of her most contented moments, when, as milkmaid, she falls in love. She stands in a field laden with wheat and poppies, picked out in Japanese-inspired strokes and dashes. The overall effect evokes, as one newspaper reviewer noted, the ‘languor of an English summer afternoon imperceptibly stealing over you’.
Nairn was a provocative figure, generating some of the most dynamic critical debates in New Zealand’s art history — even penning glowing reviews of his own work under a pseudonym. Accused of ‘chromatic lunacy’ by one newspaper critic,2 Nairn privately retorted, ‘I shall always make the point of trying to outrage the taste of the ordinary public, as I do not want them to like my work’. Nonetheless, his work was admired and collected: fellow Scotsman and local businessman John Newton purchased several of Nairn’s more progressive paintings, including these, which were both subsequently given by his daughter, Mary Newton, to the National Art Gallery in 1939.
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