An Early Donation

These striking mustachioed features hint at the globetrotting habits of an early museum benefactor. In the early days of Pākehā settlement, Victorian ideals of the day led New Plymouth-based museums up some interesting paths, and exotica from foreign climes was keenly sought. Adolphus Kyngdon, a widely travelled Taranaki resident, appears as a generous donor to a New Plymouth Museum in the early 1900s, when he gifted what was described in a newspaper report as “a large and beautiful collection of Burmese, Japanese and South Sea Island curios and specimens of art”. The old museum catalogue entry records Kyngdon’s gift of three “miniature heads” from Japan among this material. At this stage, very little else is known about the heads, which appear to be made of painted plaster and fitted with hair of some sort. Kyngdon, who seems to have been an active, public spirited man, was described by an article in the Hawaiian Gazette on 28 November 1893 as a “travelling correspondent” for a Taranaki newspaper who had made a “circuit of the globe” so he would have had plenty of chances to hunt for souvenirs.