‘Let’s do this!” cheered the Newtown barista in response to the news that I would like a long black and a cheddar scone.
Time was when I had a spare day in Wellington that I’d try to set up meetings, do some research, get to the exhibitions. Recently, the day after a conference, it seemed enough to spread another town’s newspaper across a cafe table and bask in an absence of urgency. The coffee and the scone – neatly pan-grilled – were worthy of the cheer.
Outside, Newtown was stretching and yawning. The busker by Moon cracked a smile when his mate turned up with a couple of bottles of wine, workers crowded around sunlit tables on Constable St and the shops began to open. My friend appeared in her car and we set out to do no more than browse the city’s op shops.
Kilbirnie offered some canary-yellow cups and saucers from the Finnish ceramics house Arabia, and the place opposite Park Road Post laid out a full set of Denby in a deep jade glaze, but the mugs had been battered inside by too many teaspoons. At the next stop, the Sallies, there was a Miramar miracle.
Two hand-painted cups and matching saucers, all signed underneath “E Baird Friberg Picton N.Z. 1915″ in the same gold paint that traced the outline of flower petals around each piece. The cups were French porcelain, sold as blanks by Limoges in the early 20th century, and the signature was that of Elizabeth Baird Friberg, who would have been 33 at the time, and married three years to the Rev Nils Arnold Friberg.
Elizabeth was a lady painter and exhibited her works – mostly watercolours of coastlines and alpine valleys, lit with golden weather – with regional arts societies. The paintings still come through auction houses occasionally, and sell for a few hundred dollars. But I wanted to know: were these fine cups also part of her practice, or just a one-off?
A local historian came up with a review of a rose bowl and tea set she entered in the Otago Art Society’s 1919 exhibition: “an exhibit that Dunedin may very well be proud of”, declared the Evening Star. I dug a little deeper into Papers Past and Elizabeth finally appeared, living in Merivale, where the Press visited her in 1956. It had been more than 50 years since she’d fallen in love with china painting while studying art in Melbourne.
It was no dalliance. She imported Christchurch’s first gas kiln from the US and engaged the manager of the Christchurch Gas Company who, according to the Press, “acted on her suggestions and found a heat that met her needs for firing”.
My cups and saucers, in “mist blue” and 24-carat gold (“burnished with glass brushes”), appear to be part of a life’s work; a set running to hundreds of pieces, completed over 30 years and eventually given to her daughter. How they found their way to Miramar I don’t know, but her grandson, Roger Page, who acted in the TV series Close to Home and Mortimer’s Patch and was a painter himself, died in Wellington in 2014.
Elizabeth, in her seventies when the Press came calling, had almost given up her paints during a period of ill health a couple of years before, but found her muse again and completed a tea set with a koru motif.
“Now, delighted to find herself still mobile, she sits in a sunny alcove of her sitting room and busies herself touching up china or watercolours,” wrote the Press’s reporter admiringly.
“At my age,” she told the paper, with the air of a woman who had relieved herself of duty, “I feel I have earned the right to do just what I want to do at leisure.”
