James Chapman-Taylor

James Walter Chapman Taylor was born in London, England, on 24 June 1878, the son of Theodore Chapman Taylor and his wife, Ada Thomas. Theodore was an agricultural graduate and quantity surveyor and Ada a teacher, linguist and journalist. In 1879 Theodore came out to New Zealand, where he purchased 62 acres of hilly, heavily forested land, part of the Ngaere block, a few miles south of Stratford. Ada Taylor, James and a younger brother joined him in June 1880.

Chapman-Taylor is best known for his domestic architecture. His career spanned nearly 60 years, during which period he designed and built some 84 houses. For the most part he was influenced by the ideas of the English Arts and Crafts movement, which promoted a return to the simple, traditional English cottage style, with interior features in adzed timber, whitewashed plaster walls, large beams and lintels, small framed windows and hand-crafted fittings. During his early years in Wellington he used the Australian native timber jarrah almost exclusively for interior surfaces and furniture, and his preference for this heavy dark wood earned him the nickname ‘Jarrah-Taylor’. He admired the architectural work of Charles Voysey, M. H. Baillie Scott, Sir Edwin Lutyens, E. W. Gimson, Ernest and Sidney Barnsley and C. R. Ashbee. In 1909 and again in 1914 Chapman-Taylor travelled to England to view the work of these architects and to observe traditional English cottages at first hand.

Chapman-Taylor also made a significant contribution to photography in New Zealand. From 1907 his photographs appeared in the magazine Progress (renamed New Zealand Building Progress in 1914). The photographs were also used to illustrate his written articles. In the 1920s he was an active member of the Auckland Camera Club. His photography became increasingly art-inspired as he experimented with special lenses and discovered the variety of effects possible through choice of papers and exposures. Egmont and the children of the mountain mist, published in 1931, included 21 photographic plates and demonstrated his skill as a photographer.

In Silverstream in the late 1930s Chapman-Taylor installed a well-equipped darkroom in his home at Chatsworth Road and photography became a professional enterprise. He created a demand for a new style of personal photography, advertised as ‘Portraits in your home’. This was his alternative to contemporary studio portraiture which he considered too formal and unnatural. Other successes came from his membership of the Wellington Camera Club, which won the Bledisloe Cup for inter-club competition in New Zealand on eight occasions between 1942 and 1950 when Chapman-Taylor was a participating member. He also acted as a critic and judge in local competitions. In 1948 he became an associate member of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain.

James Chapman-Taylor died on 28 October 1958 at Lower Hutt, survived by his fourth wife and six children. The Evening Post obituary described him as a ‘creative artist whose life was an inspiration to hundreds of New Zealanders in many walks of life’.

Citation:

Judy Siers. ‘Chapman-Taylor, James Walter’, first published in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, vol. 3, 1996. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3c11/chapman-taylor-james-walter (accessed 20 September 2017)