THE Molly Morpeth Canaday Award is widely recognised as one of New Zealand’s leading art awards, attracting entries from around the country and helping to define contemporary art in Aotearoa.
The story of this remarkable woman who lent her name to the award – and helped to put Whakatane on the art map – is less widely known. However, it is a story that deserves to be told.
Frank
Frank Harrison Canaday was born in New Castle, Indiana, on September 21, 1893, one of four brothers. He was the son of Miles Canaday, a banker and member of the city council and Sarah Helena Schmidt, daughter of German immigrants to the United States.
Frank graduated from Harvard College where he was a member of Delta Upsilon and Signet Society, a group dedicated to the production of literary work. He wrote for The Crimson, Harvard’s daily newspaper, showing a passion for writing that would continue throughout his life.
After graduating, Frank worked in a number of advertising positions, and with the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted in 1917. He became a lieutenant of the 333rd Field Artillery and was mainly active as a French translator. After armistice he was posted with the Rent, Reclamation and Claims Service of the United States Army.
On return to the United States after the war, Frank continued working in advertising and spent time in Shanghai, China promoting tobacco.
In 1926 he returned to America to work for the United States Advertising Corporation and two years later departed on a world trip arranging advertising contracts in support of the Willys-Knight cars produced by the Willys-Overland Company of Toledo. It was on the passage from
Australia to New Zealand that Frank’s life would change course in the chance meeting of Molly.
In the words of Frank, “… ours was a meeting in the narrowest niche of time and the earth’s breadth, as if the business trip taking me around the world had been planned by fate with no other intent than to place me aboard the old SS Ulimaroa on that particular December voyage of 1928.”
Molly
Born in Wellington in 1903, Mary Russell “Molly” Morpeth was the youngest of three sisters. She was the daughter of Charlton Douglas Morpeth and Florence Euphemia Pope. Molly grew up in the family home at 246 The Terrace. Her father was a chartered accountant, an enthusiastic watercolourist, honorary auditor for the New Zealand Academy of Fine Art and an art collector. As a result Molly grew up surrounded with paintings by Sydney Thompson, James Nairn, Frances Hodgkins and Rhona Haszard, who was Molly’s second cousin.
Her mother’s first passion was music. Another of her passions was gardening, which came into full bloom when the family bought an extensive property in the Hutt Valley, where Molly and her mother arranged the gardens and planted the flower beds. Gardening became an enduring passion.
In 1926 she attended Wellington Technical School where she received a classical training in life drawing and sculpture, influenced by the works of John Sargent and Laura Knight. But one of her teachers, Christopher Perkins, challenged this classical training.
While returning from a family trip to Australia in 1928, Molly met Frank. They met again twice, briefly, in Wellington, before embarking on a lengthy correspondence over the next four years. By the time his round-the-world trip brought him home, Frank had “encountered the 1929 economic crash, which reduced my resources to near zero and dimmed my future prospects for a prolonged period to below matrimonial considerations”.
In 1932, they finally met again in London where Frank, voyaging with funds borrowed on an insurance policy, sought Molly’s hand in marriage; by December that year they were married in Toledo, Ohio, where they lived for the next 14 years, where she and Frank became benefactors of Joseph Floch, and Molly continued to paint.
New York
In 1947, with improved finances, Frank persuaded Molly to move to New York, allowing her to work closely with Joseph in his Lincoln Square studio and visit the many galleries. Frank was able to try his hand as a writer.
After several moves around Greenwich Village, Frank and Molly settled on a fourth floor walk-up studio at 126 Washington Place. Frank wrote short stories and eventually a novel on a card table in the bedroom, while Molly painted in an improvised studio in the living room.
Agent Franz J Horch agreed to handle Frank’s literary output, but unfortunately he died prematurely of a heart attack and without his guidance and with dwindling finances, Frank reluctantly shelved plans for a literary life and resumed work at the Willys-Overland Motor Company.
In 1949, Frank and Molly were invited by Frank’s brother, Ward, to spend the summer in South Woodstock, Vermont, at his country residence, Upwey, known locally as “the mansion”. The Vermont landscape was a revelation for Molly, and she spent many hours plein air painting – a practice advocated by the French impressionist painters such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The summer of painting culminated in an exhibition of 23 works at the Dudensing Gallery in Woodstock, Vermont, in 1950.
The experience of the Vermont landscape inspired Frank and Molly to purchase a small cottage in South Woodstock, which they named Cleftwaters. This became their summer home for the remainder of their lives together, and was a constant source of inspiration for Molly.
In 1932, Frank had promised Molly he would take her on a grand tour of Europe. Twenty-two years later, they sailed to Italy aboard the Andrea Doria, arriving on February 4, 1954, and meeting Molly’s sister Nona, in Rome. Over the following weeks, they travelled around Greece, Italy, Spain and France, visiting galleries and seeing first-hand the best of Europe’s rich art heritage.
On returning from Europe, Molly continued to work with Joseph, but slowly moved away from his influence to a more independent exploration of what contemporary art had to offer.
The 1950s were an intoxicating time to be in New York. The New York school, otherwise known as abstract expressionism, was emerging from the aftermath of World War II, when artists drew away from the traditional idea of creating a window onto the world, in their efforts to create monumental works that reflected their own inner worlds. They valued spontaneity, improvisation, and the physical process of painting.
Molly absorbed these new ideas and ways of painting into her own work. In 1960, Molly finally had her own studio at 100 West 25th Street, which provided her even greater freedom to experiment with these new ideas.
During this time, her paintings showed a new maturity and increasing confidence. Her work was also finding increased acceptance. In 1966 she won the Marcia Brady Tucker Prize, a top award for oil painting, in the annual exhibition of the National Association of Women Artists.
Another still-life in a series depicting bottles, was then selected for inclusion in a two-year travelling exhibition. By 1968, in failing health, her time in the studio faded. Finally, in the words of Frank, “… in January of 1971, there was release for her – and grief for me.”
Legacy
A year after her death, Molly was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at the Toledo Museum of Art. Then in 1974, she had her last farewell in New Zealand with a retrospective exhibition at the National Art Gallery.
Molly always retained an interest in the New Zealand art scene, but she lamented that few New Zealanders had the opportunity to see the great masters of art history that she had seen while living in America and during her travels through Europe.
Both Frank and Molly had hoped that a bequest to New Zealand galleries would enable them to purchase paintings for all New Zealanders to see but during their last visit together to New Zealand in 1968, they realised the futility of their idea.
Instead, they looked to improve the galleries and enable them to borrow paintings from overseas galleries although unfortunately, with Molly’s untimely death, they didn’t have time to work out the details.
Frank was eager to fulfil Molly’s desire to assist New Zealand galleries, and during his visit to New Zealand in 1974, he made nine gifts in loving memory of his wife, all of them to art galleries, except Whakatane. Institutions that benefited from his generosity included the National Art Gallery, the Waikato Museum, the Auckland Art Gallery, the Dunedin Art Gallery, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (New Plymouth), and the Sarjeant Art Gallery (Whanganui).
In drafting these grants, Frank worked with Molly’s cousin, Rex Morpeth, on the wording of trust documents; Rex served 21 years in local government and was mayor of Whakatane from 1965 to 1976, and it is through this liaison that the Whakatane connection was born. Also during this time, Frank set about writing the story of his life together with Molly. Unfortunately, in June 1976, Frank passed away, before closing the final chapter and seeing his book Triumph in Color published.
Throughout their life together, Frank, an urbane figure, never critiqued a painting or offered a suggestion about a particular painting. He provided the support and the means for Molly to pursue her own journey as an artist. In a life of complexities they lived in harmony.
By Hamish Pettengell