St John’s Collegiate School art lessons taught by Wilhelm Dittmer
While working on a research request we came across this advertisement for drawing, painting, and sketching lessons at St John’s College to be taught by Wilhelm Dittmer. This piece of ephemera is held in our ‘St John’s School and King’s College’ collection of papers.
Herr Dittmer was a German-born artist who had arrived in New Zealand prior to the turn of the Twentieth Century. In 1899, he had established “The Auckland School of the Decorative Arts” in his studio in Victoria Arcade on Queen Street.
His art was included in the Auckland Society of Arts exhibition in 1900, alongside other notable New Zealand artists as Louis John Steele, Frank and Waiter Wright and C. F. Goldie. All of who were integral in the development of colonial art in New Zealand. These artists also had, at one time, studios in Victoria Arcade where many of them held art classes for the paying public.
In 1901 Herr Dittmer was teaching landscape and painting at The Ladies College and School of Music in Remuera. By 1902, he was employed by St John’s Collegiate School at the Pah Homestead in Hillsborough as a Visiting Master instructing pupils in landscape painting. The school had moved from the campus of St John’s College in Tamaki earlier that year.
By 1904 he had left New Zealand for London. His book ‘Te Tohunga: The Ancient Legends and Traditions of the Maori’ was published in 1907. It was criticised at the time for its inaccuracies in recounting these Maori legends but the dazzling, stylised line-work of the illustrations is still rather striking.
Wilhelm Dittmer died only two years after the publication of Te Tohunga in 1909 in Hamburg, Germany.
