Julie King memorial lecture

"I did not want to be Mrs Colin McCahon": the life and art of Anne Hamblett (1915-1993).

Four years older than her husband-to-be, Colin McCahon, Anne Hamblett was regarded as the superior artist at the Dunedin School of Art where she studied for her Diploma between 1934 and 1937.

Her first class passes, scholarships, and prizes should have propelled her into making art her career, but unlike her friend Doris Lusk, who was able to muster 60 paintings for a solo show at the Moray Place studio in August 1940, Hamblett was never prolific.

Married in 1942, with four children born between 1943 and 1949, Anne Hamblett's artistic profile diminished after she became Anne McCahon. What happened to her desire to be an artist, and what can the story of her life and art tell us about the choices that women artists make?

Linda Tyler has taught art history at Canterbury, Victoria, Waikato and Auckland universities, and design history at Unitec and Otago Polytechnic, and been an art curator at Waikato Museum, the Hocken Library and Gus Fisher Gallery.

She wrote her MA thesis on the Austrian architect Ernst Plischke and her PhD on the Colonial Museum botanist and draughtsman John Buchanan. Since 2018, she has been convenor of the Museums and Cultural Heritage programme at the University of Auckland.

Lecture presented by the Friends of the Art Gallery courtesy of the Estate of the late Julie King. Art historian Julie King was Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Canterbury and an Honorary Life Member and Patron of the Friends.

Anne Hamblett, Spring Blossom, 1939, oil on board, 600 x 520mm. Courtesy of Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland.