Juliet Peter
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1915, d.2010
Untitled [Clearing Bush and Hoeing]
- c. 1947-1952
- Pen, brush, ink on paper
- Purchased 2015
- 235 x 212mm
- 2015/031
Location: Contemporary Collections Gallery
Tags: animals, bulldozers, cows (mammals), farming, hoes (agricultural tools), men (male humans), monochrome, people (agents), stripes, trees
In the second half of the 1940s, Juliet Peter became more widely known as an illustrator through her role for the Department of Education’s School Publications branch and commissions by the New Zealand Listener. As this series of black and white sketches indicate, her interest in rural life informed the texts she chose to illustrate. A 1948 profile of the artist reported that her work often included field trips: “Miss Peter does not do all her drawings in the office. Last week she went out stalking a milkman and his horse to get sketches for a story […] another day she walked through half a mile of sticky mud to make drawings inside a wool-shed for the shearing chapter in Te Awa Awa.”
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)
Exhibition History
Beneath the Ranges, 18 February – 23 October 2017
Juliet Peter was made principal illustrator for the School Publications Branch of the Education Department in Wellington in 1947. Her fluid, stylised black and white drawings became well-known to a generation of young New Zealanders. Peter left the department in 1951 to study at the Central School of Art and Design in London. In the following year she married fellow artist Roy Cowan, whom she had met at School Publications. In London again in 1953, Peter also studied lithography and pottery part-time at the Hammersmith College of Building and Arts and Crafts. In New Zealand, Peter remained one of the School Journal’s most prolific designer/illustrators. Her work strongly influenced the publication’s visual character until 1960 through hundreds of line drawings and dozens of two-colour cover designs. Her later artistic output was principally in ceramics.