‘Lost’ Thoughts

On 25 July 1890, James McLauchlan Nairn (1859–1904), a visiting ‘member of the Glasgow Art Club’, delivered his first lecture in New Zealand to the students of the Dunedin School of Art. This took place only six months after a health condition had forced the artist’s sudden departure from Scotland. In a 1975 publication by the National Art Gallery, it was claimed that the content of Nairn’s first lecture presented to the pupils of David Con Hutton’s life drawing class in Dunedin was lost. That is, until a transcript of the lecture verbatim was rediscovered in the Otago Witness, published 7 August 1890. The lecture is briefly mentioned in appendices and citations in unpublished sources, but at no point is the content of the lecture sufficiently analysed.

Nairn’s lecture entitled ‘Decorative Art’ did not discuss painting. Instead, he endorsed the following key features of the Aesthetic movement: the ‘pictorial’ and ‘decorative’ representation of art; the artist George Frederic Watts; the Grosvenor Gallery in London; the arduous study of antique traditions; the simplicity of Japanese art; and Walter Crane, the artist-designer of the Arts and Crafts movement. This lecture presents a revisionist take on an artist who, for some time, has been recognised strictly in terms of his ‘impressionist’ credentials. The lecture suggests that this does not present the full picture of Nairn’s significant contribution to New