Grace Butler

Biography

Grace Butler's maiden name was Cumming. She was born on 23 December 1886 in Invercargill, in the south of New Zealand, the daughter of Scottish immigrants, Jane Cameron and William Forbes Cumming, a carter and contractor. Her father died in 1889, and the family moved to the North Island. Grace attended school at Norsewood, where her eldest sister was a teacher.

From 1903 to 1907 she studied art at the Napier Technical School, where she also taught. In 1910 she enrolled at the Canterbury College School of Art in Christchurch (now the Ilam School of Fine Arts) and studied there until 1914. In her first year she was awarded the Advanced Art Scholarship. Her teachers included Sydney Thompson, Leonard Booth, Cecil Kelly and Richard Wallwork. On 1 March 1911, between these two stages of study, she married Guy Raphael Butler, a law clerk from Poverty Bay, in Gisborne, and the couple settled in Christchurch. They had three daughters.

In 1915 Butler became a working member of the Canterbury Society of Arts, and from then on she exhibited regularly with New Zealand art societies: the Auckland Society of Arts, the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, the Otago Art Society and, in 1934, The Group. She showed work at the Canterbury Society until 1960. Her paintings were sent to the British Empire Exhibition in London (1924) and to the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition in Dunedin (1925–1926). In 1916 and 1920 the Canterbury Society acquired two of her landscapes for its permanent collection. Auckland Art Gallery holds “Glaciers, Rolleston Mountains” (presented to the gallery in 1922), “Bush Trees, Lake Kanieri” and “Governor's Bay”; “Summertime, Arthur's Pass” (c. 1945) is also counted among her notable works.

Landscape became her main subject, and many of her pictures were painted around Otira. She first travelled to the area in 1916 and then went back regularly: with her husband she bought a cabin at Arthur's Pass. The critic James Shelley wrote that no artist in New Zealand had quite the same sympathy with alpine scenery, and the painter Olivia Spencer Bower regarded her as one of the first women who bothered about New Zealand scenery at all. Butler was committed to painting outdoors and often worked in bad weather at remote sites, reaching them on foot. The relation of light to tone and colour was, for her, the heart of a landscape. In 1923–1925 she attended Sydney Thompson's classes again, sharing his view of open-air painting. From the late 1920s the Impressionists influenced her more and more, and her manner became freer and looser. To my mind, the smoothness of her early work gave way to a quicker brushstroke at just that time, and it is easy to see in her later mountain views.

Grace Butler died on 23 November 1962 in Wellington.