Lot Essay
For Gordon Cumming's account of her stay in Tahiti (at Papeete and on Moorea in December 1877) see C.F. Gordon Cumming, A Lady's cruise in a French Man-of-War, London, 1882, II, pp. 175-263)
The Property of a Lady
The following four watercolours by Constance Frederica Gordon Cumming all date to her years in the Pacific from 1875-1878. A veteran of travels to India in 1868-9 and to Ceylon in 1873-4, she accompanied her brother Sir Arthur Hamilton Gordon and Lady Gordon to Fiji in the spring of 1875. Gordon had been appointed the first Governor of Fiji after the islands had been annexed to Great Britain in the autumn of 1874 at the invitation of the King and High Chiefs of the islands. Gordon Cumming spent two years in Fiji (recalled in her narrative At Home in Fiji published in 1881) and then went on an extended cruise east of Samoa to Tonga, Tahiti, the Marquesas and other Pacific islands on a French man-of-war at the service of the Bishop of Samoa (recalled in another narrative, A Lady's cruise in a French Man-of-War published in 1882).
She sketched in the Pacific as she had in India and Ceylon and used her watercolours to illustrate the narratives which invariably followed her trips. After the Pacific her travels took her to North America and the Far East and her later years were devoted to teaching a numerical version of Braille to illiterate Chinese in the Mandarin speaking districts of China
Constance Frederica Gordon Cumming (1837-1924)
Details
Constance Frederica Gordon Cumming (1837-1924)
Pueu, Tahiti
signed, inscribed and dated 'Pueu/Tahiti-Society Isles/C.F. Gordon Cumming./Dec 1877/Foreground.Pandanus.(screwpine./distant Scarlet blossomed Cotton tree';
watercolour heightened with white, unframed
13½ x 20 5/8in. (343 x 523mm.)
Pueu, Tahiti
signed, inscribed and dated 'Pueu/Tahiti-Society Isles/C.F. Gordon Cumming./Dec 1877/Foreground.Pandanus.(screwpine./distant Scarlet blossomed Cotton tree';
watercolour heightened with white, unframed
13½ x 20 5/8in. (343 x 523mm.)