Buller’s Butterflies of New Zealand

Arthur Percival Buller, his times, his friends and his paintings

This is about Percy Buller. For many years Kristy McDonald KC’s Edwardian kauri locker in the old Wellington Law Library housed a rather battered lawyer’s wig tin, black with gold trim and inscription, “A.P. BULLER Esq.
re.
” When the library was gutted she couldn’t find an owner so brought it home and it sat in our attic for years. There I stumbled across it again and I wondered about that name and found it was Percy Buller’s: he practised law only briefly, but he was a founder of Buddle Findlay.

Percy Buller’s forebears were famous – Walter Lawry Buller1 (Buller’s Birds) was his father and Charlotte Mair2 his mother.

Some of his close friends were famous too – Alexander Turnbull3 notably, but others also of the Wellington well to do. 

They formed a small clique of wealthy or professional young men who could pretend to the status of colonial gentry.

Is Percy famous? not so much, though he was said to be one of the most amiable and genial of men, gentle, with not a single enemy, a man of great enthusiasms. An anglophile, a fly fisherman, a singing banjo player, an automobile lover when cars were a rare luxury, an entomologist, a painter of beautiful miniature
watercolours of butterflies and moths.