Ernest William Christmas

Biography

In 1900 the Australian government gave Ernest William Christmas a task that painters are rarely asked to perform: to gather paintings in Europe for the Australian Federal International Exhibition, due to open at the Royal Exhibition Building. In two years he sent home about 270 works. On his return, his own painting was, by report, greatly improved.

He was born on 28 January 1863 in Yankalilla, not far from Adelaide, in South Australia. His parents were immigrants from England. His father, John, tried his hand at various occupations and for a time was mayor of Kadina. Ernest took his first drawing lessons in Adelaide and Sydney. He is thought to have been strongly influenced by the realistic landscapes of Henry James Johnstone, but there are no details, and the connection is hard to verify. From 1894 to 1900 he lived in Kalgoorlie, on the goldfields of Western Australia. The cultural historian Tim Bonyhady calls him a minor artist there, who painted “Aborigines and dead trees”. In those same years Christmas paid his first extended visit to New Zealand. From about 1905 to 1907 he lived in New Zealand, worked for the Tourist Department and painted in various parts of the country. His pictures were shown at exhibitions of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts. He was elected a member of the Royal Society and exhibited with them in 1909 and 1910; his work was also shown at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts.

After that he travelled even more. From 1911 to 1913 he visited Argentina and Chile and roamed throughout the Andes. Some of what he painted there was included in the 1914 edition of William Henry Koebel’s book “Argentina Past and Present”. In 1915 he crossed North America and reached San Francisco, where his pictures were shown among the works of the Society of Californian Artists.

In 1916, on his way back to Australia, Christmas stopped in Hawaii and decided not to leave. He arrived already in poor health and died in Honolulu on 29 July 1918. His Hawaiian landscapes, volcanic in subject, brought him recognition; he is placed in the Volcanic School on the strength of these works, although the sources say little about that school.