Pumpkin Cottage, Silverstream

Influenced by late 19th-century French artists, whose work he had seen in Glasgow before coming to Aotearoa in 1890, the artist James McLauchlan Nairn became an enthusiast for working en plein air. In 1894, he rented a small cottage at Silverstream, near Whakatiki Upper Hutt, for members of the progressive Wellington Art Club, which he had helped to establish in 1892. The cottage remained a vital base for club members—such as Herbert Fitzherbert, Thomas Arthur McCormack, Flora Scales, Maud Sherwood, and Nugent Welch—for many years.

The significance of the pumpkin derives from a previous owner, a farmer who is said to have alerted his son that there was milking to be done by putting a pumpkin on the chimney. Knowing of the story, Nairn hoisted a pumpkin on a long pole and placed it on the roof of the cottage. He painted the words ‘Ye signe of ye golden pumpkin’ on the building.

At Silverstream, far away from the conservative art politics associated with the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington, members of the Wellington Art Club drank wine, listened to lectures, criticised each other’s work and, like the Impressionists, painted directly from life using portable easels, working quickly to capture changing light effects.