Honore Forster reveals that, for the last 20 years of his life, Rex Nan Kivell was passionately involved in a personal project to document portraits of influential people connected with the Australasian region The magnificent array of books, pictures, maps and other items which make up the Nan Kivell Collection in the National Library of Australia is an enduring reminder of the collecting genius and acumen of Sir Rex de Charembac Nan Kivell (1898–1977), one of the Library’s greatest benefactors. For most people, Rex Nan Kivell is best known as the man behind this collection. Another achievement, which meant an enormous amount to Nan Kivell himself during the latter part of his life, has been largely forgotten. His personal papers reveal that for almost 20 years he worked on an ambitious project closely linked to his artistic interests and expertise—the first major inventory of portraits relating to Australasia and the Pacific. The end result, a large, lavishly illustrated folio volume, containing entries for thousands of portraits, was published in London in 1975. It was entitled Portraits of the Famous and Infamous: Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific 1492–1970. Nan Kivell compiled Portraits in collaboration with another expatriate New Zealander, Sydney A. Spence, a bookseller and self-published author of bibliographies on James Cook, William Bligh and Antarctica. Nan Kivell’s papers in the Manuscript Collection of the National Library (MS4000) show that he had begun to think about a portraits book in the early 1950s. By that time he was an important figure in the London art scene, principally as director of the celebrated Redfern Gallery, and had amassed a vast amount of material—pictures and prints, books, maps, manuscripts and historical objects—relating to the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. Part of this magnficent array of items had already been consigned on loan to the National Library and negotiations were under way for the acquisition of the entire collection for the benefit of the Australian people. Among the pictures and prints which had caught Nan Kivell’s eye over the years were numerous portraits of navigators, mapmakers, explorers, convicts, public figures, artists, writers, Maoris and Aboriginal people—any and all sorts of people who had some connection with the Pacific area. He envisaged, at first, an inventory of all the engraved portraits in his own collection, together with others he hoped to trace in public and private collections.
Sydney Spence may have been the catalyst for the project, although there is no concrete evidence for this in the Nan Kivell archive. However, the timing of Nan Kivell’s interest in the inventory invites such speculation. In 1952, Spence published privately A Bibliography of Selected Early Books and Pamphlets Relating to Australia 1610–1880. A small limited-edition booklet of 88 pages, it contains an interesting and scholarly survey of the literature, some of it little known at that time. The last five pages consist of a ‘List of Early Australian Engraved Portraits’, an alphabetical list of 88 portraits of notable figures in early Australian history with details of the engraver as well as the size and whereabouts of the portrait. The arrangement is remarkably similar to that adopted by Nan Kivell 10 years later in a first draft of Portraits. Spence sent Nan Kivell an inscribed copy of his 1952 bibliography (now NK3982) and late in 1953 was writing to him about some fine portraits that he had recently obtained, of Henry Goulburn and governors Hunter and Phillip. Nan Kivell’s papers contain no hint of any planned collaboration with Spence on a portraits book at this stage, but there was clearly a shared interest in Pacific-oriented portraiture. From 1955 onwards Nan Kivell’s correspondence contains an increasing number of references to ‘his’ portraits book. In February 1955 he wrote to the Mitchell Library about collecting ‘all the known engraved portraits of personalities connected with the South Pacific, early voyagers, explorers, statesmen, writers, naturalists, governors ... I have been cataloguing them and intend when far enough advanced to publish them.’ He wrote along similar lines to the National Library and the Turnbull Library in New Zealand and received encouraging replies. A few months later, Nan Kivell informed various missionary society secretaries in London of his plans for a book listing ‘Portraits of prominent people connected with the early development of the Pacific and Australasia’, and asked for permission to photograph missionary portraits in their collections. He assured them—perhaps over-optimistically—that the governments of Australia and New Zealand were ‘sponsoring’ his work. Nan Kivell’s original ideas about the type of portraits he wanted to use for the project were gradually modified. From concentrating purely on engraved material, he began to envisage listing portraits in all mediums, including photographs. The book itself was to be on a grand scale, containing coloured and black-and-white reproductions arranged alphabetically, with biographical notes and other descriptive data, together with entries for non-illustrated portraits. It would be accompanied by bound volumes of portrait photographs, one set of which would eventually be deposited in the National Library in Canberra for general reference. This grand design was to become a major preoccupation in Nan Kivell’s busy and demanding life.
Biographical studies of Rex Nan Kivell show that, from early manhood, he skilfully and deliberately went about developing a romantic and intriguing persona for himself, building on a mundane background in New Zealand and his unremarkable war record. In London he worked hard to create the image of a distinguished, cultured art connoisseur of aristocratic origins. He was, of course, in reality an astute and knowledgeable collector and art gallery director who had acquired considerable wealth and was able to live luxuriously in London and maintain a beautiful villa in Tangier. But Nan Kivell also had ambitions as an author (he had already published a slim volume relating to an archaeological site in Wiltshire where he had worked in the 1930s) and in the early 1940s was considering writing a book on the early paintings of New Zealand. When he discovered that art historian Bernard Smith was engaged on a major work on the art of the Pacific, ‘a somewhat similar production’, as he described it in 1948, he cast about for another publishing project. The idea of compiling a unique and imposing reference book on Pacific portraits had enormous appeal, and he began work on the project with an obsessive zeal. It’s not surprising, then, given what we know of Nan Kivell, that in the surviving correspondence about the portraits book, it is he who looms large as the book’s begetter. In spite of Sydney Spence’s clearly important contribution to portrait selection and research on the people represented in the book over many years, his role and his earlier listing of early Australian engraved portraits are rarely mentioned. By the early 1960s, the book was well under way. One hundred copies of a stencilled 284-page interim draft of the text of the projected major work entitled Portraits of People Connected with Australia, New Zealand and the South Seas: from 1579 to 1960 (with a few additions from Public Collections) in the Rex Nan Kivell Collection were bound and printed for Nan Kivell in 1962 and distributed to libraries, museums and other institutions thought likely to be interested in acquiring the final version. The positive comments that resulted proved the worth of the undertaking. Pauline Fanning, of the National Library, wrote approvingly of the ‘dictionary of portraits’ in her article on the Rex Nan Kivell Collection in the Australian Library Journal of July 1962. The Mitchell Library welcomed the draft and offered help; the Turnbull Librarian said it ‘was so good, it is worth making better’, and the Royal Australian Historical Society thought the suggested list was comprehensive and attractive.
With interest in the book stimulated by the draft edition, Nan Kivell did all he could to maintain it. Throughout the 1960s he kept up his correspondence about the book’s progress, not only with institutions but also with influential friends like Maie Casey, wife of the Australian Governor-General. In 1968 she wrote an article for Art and Australia, ‘ An Introduction to the Nan Kivell Collection’, in which she refers to his ‘insatiable search for portraits for the book he is now assembling for the Australian Government’, a statement based on information supplied to her by Nan Kivell, who remained hopeful that the Australian Government would give official backing to the project. His letters to Sir Robert Menzies, the then prime minister, with whom he was on friendly terms, reflect this view. As time went on, however, it became clear that the Australian Government would not be involved in any major way with the book’s publication. The National Library had always been supportive of the project, with staff members searching for and supplying essential data about a large number of portraits, but it too found itself unable to take any significant role in the actual publication, though it did offer to help with the distribution of the book. Eventually Nan Kivell had to accept the fact that he would be shouldering the expense of publication himself (there is no suggestion that Spence ever made any financial contribution). Nan Kivell’s letters show his sustained efforts to find a suitable, and affordable, printer. As work on the book neared completion, Nan Kivell became increasingly concerned about the price of high-quality printing and colour reproduction quoted to him by various prominent local and foreign firms. ‘I am,’ he wrote in 1969, ‘simply staggered at the prices quoted to me’. Eventually he settled on the quaintly-named Flarepath Printers, of St Albans, whose prices seemed more reasonable. Even so, he complained bitterly to Flarepath about price increases: ‘I knew I would never hope for any profit from the book, but I never envisaged such a disastrous loss that the production could be judging on your estimated prices today’ (5 May 1972). In 1973 Nan Kivell believed the cost of printing would be between £10 000 and £12 000 for a limited edition of 1400 copies, a high cost indeed. But in spite of his complaints, he wrote to a friend at this time: ‘I went into the whole idea just to make an interesting useful book, and not for what I could make out of it.’ Of course Nan Kivell never envisaged popular sales for Portraits as it was intended to be a deluxe volume for a specialist market, hence the small, and inevitably costly, edition. Two things troubled Nan Kivell as the book progressed. First, the matter of a good title. He continued to be unhappy with the name, Portraits of the Famous and Infamous, which had been adopted early on as a working title; in 1969 he was still searching for something more ‘suitable’ and three years later he claimed that the title remained ‘up in the air’. He was hopeful that ‘some bright friend’ would ‘come up with the completely desirable name before it is too late’. No suggestion was forthcoming and the title was never changed. It contributed to some extent to another source of criticism. By the late 1960s, doubts had begun to surface about Nan Kivell’s extraordinarily wide-ranging choice of portraits, which by then included both historical and living persons, some of whom appeared to have only the most tenuous of connections with Australasia (prominent figures who had had geographical features named after them were among those selected). In 1969 Alec Chisholm, of the Royal Australian Historical Society, complained that Nan Kivell’s 1962 list contained names that did not merit inclusion, such as Marco Polo, Herodotus, Napoleon and the Duke of Kent, while omitting portraits of worthy persons such as John Gould whose portraits were readily available. ‘What of living persons?’ he continued. Many notable Australians were absent from the list, but the question was ‘if you go after them where are you going to stop?’ A later letter from Alec Bolton, then the London editor for Angus & Robertson, raised other typical concerns. He wrote to Nan Kivell saying that in his view the book’s title was more suitable for a collection of historical portraits than for a book in which living subjects were also included. ‘No doubt the living will be flattered to be in, but it is not hard to foresee the facetiousness of some reviewers as they speculate whether this one or that one made it for his fame or his infamy,’ he wrote. He also thought there could be a risk of trivialising the historical substance of the book: ‘it is as if one were equating the founding fathers of the nation with the present councillors of the shire.’ This stung Nan Kivell to defend the inclusion of those ‘who have been so helpful to me’ or ‘so useful in their work on the scene of Australasian development’. He felt he could not bypass them. ‘After all the book may probably go on being useful for many years to come and so their entries will justify themselves.’ At the time it seemed a sound prophecy.
By 1974 the die was cast. Portraits, warts and all, was sent to the press early in September, somewhat sooner than Nan Kivell had originally intended, but he had been warned of a ‘huge increase’ in printing costs at the end of the month. He described it proudly as a ‘whopping size’, with over 7000 entries, more than 350 of them in colour. A special matt paper had been purchased which Nan Kivell thought particularly suitable for the coloured illustrations and which also went well with the elegant Garamond type. A white vellum-like binding and a clear heavy cellophane cover were selected to give the desired deluxe appearance. It was decided to place the names of the publishers (Nan Kivell and Spence), the printer (Flarepath) and the distributors (the National Library, publisher B.T. Batsford, and booksellers Maggs Bros and Francis Edwards) all together at the end of the book. A striking engraved portrait of Ortelius, the sixteenth-century Flemish cartographer, was chosen for the frontispiece. In Nan Kivell’s view, the cartographer’s remarkably early delineation of the northern tip of Cape York in his famous Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570) made him eligible for such an eminent position in the book and it would set the tone for what was to follow. On the title page, the names of Nan Kivell and Spence appeared side-by-side; final recognition that without Spence Portraits could never have been completed. Following publication in mid-1975, complimentary copies of Portraits were quickly dispatched to the project’s longstanding supporters, both institutional and personal. ‘I’m glad you like Portraits and might find it useful,’ he wrote to one librarian in Australia. ‘People are liking it here too I am pleased to say.’ Elsewhere, he showed pride and pleasure that the book was ‘apparently interesting to a lot of people’. Of the 1400 copies printed, 600 had already been sold by March 1976. Nan Kivell began to think again about the supplement which he had always hoped to publish one day. But the severe arthritis which had plagued him for years was becoming increasingly debilitating, and he was not given long to savour the pleasures of publication. He became gravely ill and died in June 1977, aged 79, leaving Sydney Spence, his quiet collaborator, £1000 in his will. Spence, also born in 1898, died the following year. After his 20 years of passionate research, Rex Nan Kivell could never have imagined that his beloved ‘portraits book’ would eventually become more of an interesting curiosity than a major research tool. HONORE FORSTER is a Canberra-based writer, with a long-standing interest in Pacific history. This interest has been sustained by the Nan Kivell Collection in the National Library. Occasional reference to the associated Portraits of the Famous and Infamous over time led to curiosity about its creation |
||||||||||||
| Back to NLA News Index | Back to October Issue | Back to NLA Home Page |
To order a particular issue of
the NLA News e-mail nlasales@nla.gov.au
or join the Friends of the National
Library of Australia and receive a copy each month by mail.