Joe (Joseph) Bootham (12 December 1911 – 16 May 1986) was a New Zealand painter who was noted for his landscape drawings and paintings and for portraiture. Life and works Joe Bootham was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England. His formal art training, mostly undertaken in the late 1920s, consisted of various short art courses and private tuition. He married Amy Yates in 1937. He was a sometime member of the Bolton Art Circle, Burnley Modern Art Group, and The Independents. The latter were a group of Bolton artists who, in the early 1950s, met and exhibited at "Smokey Joe’s", a coffee bar popular with patrons of the nearby theatres and cinema. In 1961 he emigrated to New Zealand, travelling on the passenger liner The Southern Cross. Among his pocketbook-sized sketches of passengers on board the ship was one of Peter McLeavey, who, from 1966 onwards, was to become a well-known dealer in contemporary New Zealand art. Their shipboard acquaintance was to become a friendship of significance in 1962, when McLeavey spent time in Wanganui, where Bootham was then living. During McLeavey's many visits to Bootham's home, the artist executed the large pastel portrait of him now in the Alexander Turnbull Library collection. The significance of that friendship is expanded on in Jill Trevelyan's biography of McLeavey. In Wanganui, Bootham was a frequent exhibitor with the Wanganui Art Society. He also taught at Society meetings. Rejection for exhibition of his painting "The Day I Rode the Blue Bull Through China" provoked some controversy in local art circles. During the 1960s he came to know and admire the work of Edith Collier. Though she died before he had the chance to meet her, in 1974, in the company of other Wanganui Art Society members, he visited her former home where he met two of her surviving sisters. He also took the opportunity while there to do four drawings of trees and shrubbery in the garden about the home. The drawings are dated in the artist's hand 27.3.74. In 1966, when visiting New Plymouth, he met New Zealand regionalist painter Michael Smither and began a continuing friendship that was artistically stimulating and rewarding. From the mid-1960s until about 1970 he rented an old farm house in the Longacre Valley on the outskirts of Wanganui for use as a weekend retreat and studio. He responded to the New Zealand light and contour of the