“Messages of Love from Maoriland”: A. D. Willis’s New Zealand Christmas Cards and Booklets 1883-1893

Abstract

I have previously explored the beginnings of the New Zealand Christmas card prior to 1883, and the ways that the designers of these cards negotiated the colonial experience of a summer Christmas.1 This paper examines the development, over the decade following 1883, of the chromolithographic work of A. D. Willis, whose production not only continued the work of creating a niche for New Zealand Christmas cards, but also tried to compete with the large overseas ‘art publishers’ who were flooding the New Zealand market with northern hemisphere iconography. Willis’s Christmas cards are frequently used to illustrate books looking at the 1880s, but there has been no detailed study done of them. The paper therefore documents the cards, their production and reception, explores how they record Willis’s understanding of the art publishing business and the market he was working into, and situates them in relation to broader print culture. Understanding this overlooked chapter in ‘commercial art’ provides useful evidence of the murky interplay between the local, national and transnational identities that marked New Zealand cultural production when artists and designers sought to capture the public’s Yuletide sentiments. Willis’s work also displays two very distinct conceptions of how to represent what was increasingly known as ‘Maoriland’ to an overseas market – one focused on the land, and the other on Māori. As such, these cards act as a weathervane for what the New Zealand public accepted as New Zealand, artistic and appropriate as a Christmas gift.