Marcus King and the art in his heart
South Taranaki is well-known for bright skies and hurrying clouds, so perhaps these were influences on little Marcus King, who started his school life at the Manaia School in 1896.
Marcus’ father was Joshua King, postmaster/telegrapher, at Manaia and father of 12 children of whom Marcus was the ninth.
There were four brothers ahead of him.
Joshua’s notable predecessor was William Dawson, the passionate explorer of Mt Egmont/ Taranaki’s lower slopes, whose name was given to a spectacular waterfall in the upper reaches of the Kapuni Stream, a feature that was confirmed by a tramping party from New Plymouth and Manaia on Easter Monday 1885.
The duties of postmaster/ telegrapher included receiving and distributing mail, sending and receiving telegrams, selling game licences and being the Registrar for Births, Deaths and Marriages, all for £167 a year without an assistant to deliver mail and telegrams.
So little Marcus went along to Manaia School where the playground was still unformed. Joshua was concerned with the safety of his children and wrote a letter to the School Committee offering a donation to a fence that would divide off the horse paddock and the children’s playground.
A member of the Manaia Literary Society he read a paper on ‘Mankind’ to a well-attended meeting in August 1898.
Joshua King had proved himself to be a well-organised man and having been able to run a post office so well was rewarded by his employers with promotion to Tapanui in Central Otago in 1900. So the King family including Marcus, now 10 years old, went south.
When Marcus was 15 years old he knew that painting would be his life work. He regularly won art competitions at school displays and a competition run by the Otago Witness, a widely-read publication of the day.
This led to his winning of a junior cadetship in the architectural division of the Public Works Department in Wellington. From here he studied art at Elam in Auckland and met many of the foremost New Zealand artists in the pre-World War I era.
In 1917 Marcus was called up for service in the 34th Reinforcements and sailed to Britain as a bugler. It was the quality of his illustrations and cartoons he made for the shipboard newspaper, The Link, that gained him recognition and had his work compared to that of the Sydney Bulletin, a widely-read weekly of the day. On his return to New Zealand he spent time in teaching art and later working in commercial art. In 1935 Marcus King was appointed to the Tourist Department in Wellington and in that year he married Kathleen Clark.
Marcus produced murals and pictures for the Empire Exhibition in London in 1926 as part of the campaign to promote New Zealand and its products.
He was again a foremost illustrator for many trade exhibitions around the world. Every New Zealander has seen copies of his picture of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, a classic illustration.
Marcus King painted for the remainder of his life; the little boy from Manaia and Tapanui became perhaps the best known though rarely recognised artist of his time.
His posters, painted for the Tourist Department were displayed in embassies, on every railway station platform and government department in the country.
A most comprehensive account of his life and work has been recently published in a book MARCUS KING, Painting New Zealand for the World, by Peter Alsop and Warren Feeny.
Marcus King taught New Zealanders and others how to see this progressive and colourful country.