An excellent show has started on Maori Television presented by Dame Anne Salmond, "telling tremendous stories about our Aotearoa".  Watch on Monday nights at 8.30 or On Demand through the Maori TV website here.

​Karl Maughan 
Rhododendron & Ponga
Oil on canvas 
198 x 244 cm
Signed & dated 2005 verso
est. $35,000 - 45,000

This work sold at International Art Centre last night for $82,500.  This beats the current auction record price of $42,500 for a smaller work at Art + Object's sale of the Annie Coney collection in July 2017.

The Southland Times reports that it will cost $20 million for the Southland Museum building to come up to earthquake code, so it has been decided to close its doors. It is expected that it will find temporary exhibition space and storage facilities. It will look to retain 13 of the 41 staff members, and the tuatara will stay in the building.  The taniko inspired triangular roof was built in 1990 over existing older buildings. ​The Southland Times article is here. 

In November 2016 the Rotorua Bath House Museum was closed after suffering earthquake damage to its 100 year old building. Article by Stuff here.  It is likely to be closed for at least two years.

Lot 342: An Important and Previously unrecorded American Teapot attributed to John Bartlam.
​Photo: Courtesy of Woolley and Wallis.

An astute porcelain collector will be celebrating with champagne this week, as their broken blue and white teapot with missing lid, offered for sale last week at Salisbury auctioneers Woolley and Wallis, Fine Porcelain and Pottery sale, estimate 10,000 - 20,000 pounds, sold for a massive NZ $1,145,000. (600,000 pounds including buyer’s premium).
The canny vendor purchased the teapot at a Lincolnshire auction in 2016, where it was thought to be a possible piece of early Isleworth porcelain.
However, the teapot, recently discovered to be only the 7th known piece from the John Bartlam factory in Cain Hoy, South Carolina, was purchased by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
John Bartlam was a Staffordshire potter who emigrated to South Carolina and established a pottery factory on the Wando river and is now recognised as the first to produce porcelain in America.
The Bartlam factory (1765 - 1770) predates the earliest known porcelain factory, the American China Manufactory (1769 - 1772), run by Gousse Bonnin and George Morris in Philadelphia. 
The teapot was identified by its distinctive Chinoiserie style decoration, featuring a Sabal Palm that is the state tree of South Carolina and a crane that is local to the area, giving the teapot a clear American identity that would have appealed to the wealthy buyers of the area.
​ Previous Bartlam pieces, which curiously turned up at a 2002 Berkshire auction, were identified from sherds excavated from the original Cain Hoy kiln site.