Dictionaries of New Zealand artists are rare and invaluable to researchers on the subject. So, when the librarians at Auckland Art Gallery re-discovered a previously unknown dictionary from 1971, it set my heart a-flutter. I wondered: what gold might be found within its pages?

Entitled A Pocket Reference to Old New Zealand Artists by Brian Sherriff it pre-dates Una Platts's Nineteenth Century New Zealand Artists: A Guide and Handbook by eight years. Sherriff's book offers short paragraphs on just over 200 artists. It includes basic biographical details, brief summaries of artists' practices and in some instances institutions that hold their work.

The scarcity of published information on New Zealand artists, particularly lesser known artists, was one of the driving forces behind the Find New Zealand Artists project. So we were keen to index A Pocket Reference to Old New Zealand Artists and put it onto the site. As Tim Jones, Christchurch Art Gallery's librarian and archivist, did this he reflected: "Reading it I kept feeling that Sherriff was copying Platts, but obviously that's not possible. So is there an NZ artists Urtext somewhere that they were both drawing on?"

Tim's hunch proved to be right. While undertaking my PhD research I looked up nineteenth-century artist Louis John Steele in Sherriff. There is an obvious mistake in the entry. Within the space of two lines, two different death dates are given. An odd typo, I thought. That same day I also consulted A H McLintock's 1940 catalogue New Zealand Art: A Centennial Exhibition. The exact same error is repeated in Steele's entry, and when I compared the text they were almost identical. Curious, I compared other entries, and found with the odd omission and inclusion the texts are the same. McLintock is not referred to in A Pocket Reference, but Sherriff does state in his introduction that "this data has been re-compiled", suggesting it had previously been published.

We have now updated Find New Zealand Artists to include McLintock rather than Sherriff. It seems that Find New Zealand Artist is not only rediscovering long forgotten artists, but also publications and their interwoven histories.

Jane Davidson-Ladd

Find New Zealand Artists Steering Committee member and PhD candidate, University of Auckland