European Treasure: A. H. Reed's French and Italian Autograph Letters (2025)

Valerio Cappozzo, European Treasures. A. H. Reed’s French and Italian Autograph Letters. Dunedin City Library, New Zealand, exhibition catalogue (curated entries on French letters). October 2014

Valerio Cappozzo, European Treasure: A. H. Reed's French and Italian Autograph Letters, Dunedin Public Libraries, Dunedin, New Zealand 2015 [ISBN 978-0-473-30044-9]

2015

Catalogue of the the latest Reed Gallery Exhibition, that draws on letters in French and Italian from the Reed Autograph Letters Collection, representing specific moments of European history revealed through the individuality of the writers and recipients. Exhibition of unpublished letters, conserved at the Dunedin City Library Heritage Collections, by: Giuseppe Garibaldi, Vincenzo Gioberti, Camillo Benso Count of Cavour, Giuseppe Mazzini, Carlo Botta, Massimo D'Azeglio, Antonio Canova, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Louis Blanc, Alphonse Daudet, Louis-Philippe I, Queen Marie Amélie, Adolphe Thiers, Charles Nodier, Felice Pasquale Baciocchi, etc. [Published in conjunction with the exhibition: “European Treasure: A. H. Reed’s French and Italian Autograph Letters”, in the Reed Gallery of Dunedin City Library, Dunedin, New Zealand, October 23-January 11 2015. Online: https://www.reedgallery.co.nz/exhibitions/european-treasure

Valerio Cappozzo, Garibaldi, Gioberti, Mazzini e altri patrioti in Nuova Zelanda: storia di un collezionista, «Rivista di letteratura storiografica italiana» III (2019), pp. 107-124.

Rivista di letteratura storiografica italiana, 2019

The Heritage Collection in Dunedin City Library, on New Zealand’s South Island, preserve hundreds of folders with unpublished materials related to the collector Alfred Hamish Reed, a British emigrant to New Zealand in the late XIX century. Reed’s collection includes personal papers, the owner’s private and official correspondence, as well as objects that belonged to him and his family. The library also preserves hundreds of autograph letters owned by Reed. Among them, the French and Italian letters are of great interest; some are by eminent figures, such as Verne, Dumas, Garibaldi, Mazzini, and Gioberti. Both the exhibition entitled European Treasure: A.H. Reed’s French and Italian Autograph Letters (October 2014-January 2015) and the related catalogue offered a profile of Reed as a passionate collector. They also provided precious insights into relations among disparate authors, personalities, and their writings in the late XIX and early XX centuries. In doing so, they guided visitors and readers across several European countries and New Zealand, all of which were in search of their national identities at that time. La Heritage Collection della Dunedin City Library (South Island, Nuova Zelanda) conserva centinaia di cartelle contenenti materiale inedito relativo al collezionista Alfred Hamish Reed, emigrato dalla Gran Bretagna in Nuova Zelanda alla fine del XIX secolo. La raccolta include documenti personali, la corrispondenza privata e quella pubblica della sua casa editrice, nonché alcuni oggetti appartenuti a lui e alla sua famiglia. La biblioteca possiede anche diverse lettere autografe collezionate da Reed, fra le quali si annoverano lettere francesi di Verne e Dumas fils, per esempio, e italiane di Garibaldi, Mazzini e Gioberti. La mostra European Treasure: A.H. Reed’s French and Italian Autograph Letters (ottobre 2014-gennaio 2015) e il relativo catalogo hanno ricostruito il profilo dell’appassionato collezionista Reed, fornendo informazioni preziose sui rapporti fra i vari autori e personalità politiche o artistiche alla fine del XIX e all’inizio del XX secolo. In tal modo, ai visitatori quanto ai lettori è stata offerta una panoramica storica sulle nazioni europee e sulla Nuova Zelanda in un periodo durante il quale questi paesi erano in cerca di una loro identità nazionale.

The Colonial Family Album : Photography and Identity in Otago, 1848-1890

2017

This thesis looks at photography and album culture in Otago, New Zealand, between 1848 when the first Otago settlement colonists arrived and 1890 when snapshot cameras became widely available. It builds on work by Elizabeth Siegel and Martha Langford on nineteenth-century photograph albums, looking at their use as oral devices for self-representation. Additionally, it investigates album culture in a colonial context and situates photography in Otago within broader discussions on nineteenth-century immigration, identity and modernity. A material culture approach, which uses objects as evidence for exploring human behaviour, has been applied to 89 carte de visite and cabinet card albums holding approximately 6,000 photographs in the collection of Toitū Otago Settlers Museum. These have been supplemented by albums and photographs from other collections. This thesis examines in-depth two albums from the 1880s; one compiled by an Otago-born woman of Scottish ancestry and the other owned ...

Talleyrand catalogue

"Personalising Liturgical Prayer: The Breviary of Antonio de Macerata", Migrations: Medieval Manuscripts in New Zealand ed Stephanie Hollis and Alexandra Barratt (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 268-282.

“Messages of Love from Maoriland”: A. D. Willis’s New Zealand Christmas Cards and Booklets 1883-1893

Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History

I have previously explored the beginnings of the New Zealand Christmas card prior to 1883, and the ways that the designers of these cards negotiated the colonial experience of a summer Christmas.1 This paper examines the development, over the decade following 1883, of the chromolithographic work of A. D. Willis, whose production not only continued the work of creating a niche for New Zealand Christmas cards, but also tried to compete with the large overseas ‘art publishers’ who were flooding the New Zealand market with northern hemisphere iconography. Willis’s Christmas cards are frequently used to illustrate books looking at the 1880s, but there has been no detailed study done of them. The paper therefore documents the cards, their production and reception, explores how they record Willis’s understanding of the art publishing business and the market he was working into, and situates them in relation to broader print culture. Understanding this overlooked chapter in ‘commercial art’...

A Counterpoint of Critical Voices: Travelling Musicians in Colonial New Zealand”

“A Counterpoint of Critical Voices: Travelling Musicians in Colonial New Zealand” Context 42 (2017): 23–45, 2017

A Counterpoint of Critical Voices Helen Carr writing on “Modernism and travel (1880-1940)” comments how in this period a “remarkable number of novelists and poets were travelling writers, whether or not they were in addition actually travel writers.” The same period saw a large number of travelling musicians who, far from been travel writers, were not writers at all in many cases, but nevertheless wrote enthusiastically about their experiences. The music journals and daily press of the 19th century regularly published letters by travelling artists and critics on tour. French pianist Henri Herz’s travels in America were serialised as feuilletons in La France Musicale 1851-1852 and later Le Moniter Universel 1865-1866 before being transformed into his popular book Mes Voyages en Amérique (1866). Belgian violinist Ovide Musin sent letters to the Liège daily La Meuse, which he later modified and incorporated into a self-published volume of memories of a travelling musician. While many critics, including well-known writers such as Théophile Gautier, were commissioned to write up their travels before embarking and given a brief by the newspaper, others approached the task in a more hapzard fashion. Some travelling musicians who published accounts of their travels often did so years after their voyage, so the books perhaps lack the spontaneity and immediacy of contemporaneous articles sent to the press. Yet they were clearly based on diaries kept at the time. Although one might expect travel literature by musicians to focus on the music they encountered on their travels, this is not necessarily the case. Musicians’ familiarity with the genre of the travel literature saw them also focusing on the natural landscape, the curiosities of local customs and cultural contrasts. Although their accounts were usually written within the autobiographical genre, the personal element of their narrative is sometimes distanced in a more ethnographic manner. It is misleading to generalise, but there is a discernible continuum within the literature from the empirical and straightforwardly “realistic” description, including reportage, through to more deliberate attempts at entertainment that were obviously fictionalised, or exaggerated. It is clear that some artists deliberately sought out situations that they thought would make “good copy”. One cannot, however, ignore the unavoidable subjective presence of the author in all such writings. The musicians wrote about musical life and customs in the places they visited as well as their reception in the respective countries, but this is not so much criticism, as documentation—albeit interpreted through a personal prism. There is also a discernible interest in the notion of music as a universal language that transcends geographical barriers. There are occasions when published Memoirs, music criticism from both the performers and those reviewing them, and personal correspondence converge in a complicated and intriguing counterpoint of voices, providing a Geertzian “thick description” of a particular moment. I explore the interaction of these various voices by taking a case study of musical life in New Zealand in the mid 1890s as described by three travelling musicians— Ovide Musin’s articles and Memories, pianist Henri Kowalski’s letters written for the Courier Australien and letters from pianist Eduard Scharf, a member of Musin’s party— together with the local press reception of these visitors in New Zealand during this period.

Owner Bound Music: A study of popular sheet music selling and music making in the New Zealand home 1840-1940

From 1840, when New Zealand became part of the British Empire, until 1940 when the nation celebrated its Centennial, the piano was the most dominant instrument in domestic music making and the home pianist an important feature of New Zealand’s musical landscape. Many home pianists had their collection of individual sheets of music bound into composite volumes (“owner bound volumes”). This study’s sample of over 100 owner identified owner bound volumes (OBVs) examines the cultural and commercial significance of music sellers and music owners. Beyond the sample of OBVs, the study draws on personal and business archives, newspapers, directories and local and family histories in exploring music making over the course of a century. During the 100-year span of the study the music seller facilitated access to popular music by acting as a conduit between those composing and publishing sheet music, and the individual playing the piano in their home. As well as being a study in commerce and c...

Jane Porter's Later Works, 1825-1846

The Model of a Modern Impresario: