🖌️Catherine Wright Burcher🖼️

Mar 9, 2026

Catherine is a noted 19th century New Zealand painter. Known particularly for her copy of Edmund Blair Leighton’s ‘In Times of Peril, 1897’ which is in currently in the collection of the Auckland Art Gallery.

Edmund Leighton – 9gF4Die6xd2HeQ at Google Cultural Institute

But her talents went beyond her fantastic oil paintings. She is remembered for her rather niche skill of painting on china. A furnace in her home allowed for firing China with which she covered in her designs as well as holding workshops for the women of the Auckland Art society. She was even gifted a dessert set by Governor Grey for her to copy. Her work extended to watercolours, crayons, studies in sepia, paintings on terracotta, shells, and satin which she taught to her students.

AWMM

Being born in England, Catherine was trained by a fellow of the Royal Art Society before travelling to New Zealand.

Catherine was member of the Auckland Society of Arts from its conception, a community organisation formed in 1870 and only dissolved in 2004. It brought together over 2,000 artists from across New Zealand and put together annual art exhibits. Catherine was a part of the New Zealand Exhibition in London at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886. A painting titled ‘Whangarei Heads’ was included.

Landscape and botanical paintings included in the New Zealand court along with some cabinets of rock samples.
Woodbury Permanent Photographic Printing Company, Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London (1886). Hocken Digital Collections, accessed 09/03/2026, https://hocken.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/67699

She was on the committee of and exhibited with the New Zealand Art Students Association from 1884 to 1885; and taught art at the Auckland Girls’ High School and in 1882 organised an exhibition of art by the students which showcased a wide variety of fine art on all sorts of mediums.

Catherine was born in Cheshire, England to Rubens James Kerry, on the first of July 1849. She married Albert Edward Burcher on the 9 May 1871 in Wallasey, Cheshire, and they arrived in Auckland, New Zealand in 1878. They had one son – Albert Victor Kerry Burcher.

Catherine died on 19 May 1921, a valued exhibitor, longtime Auckland resident, and having been married for 50 years. She rests in block F, row 38, plot 133 with her husband.