Ernest William Christmas 1863 - 1918 was born near Adelaide, South Australia in 1863 and studied art in Adelaide, Sydney and in London. He painted widely in England, exhibiting in the early years of the century at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts and in the provinces. He was elected to the British Royal British Academy in 1909. In 1910-11, he painted mountains and lakes in Argentina and Chile.

In 1895, on a visit to Sydney he was advised by fellow artists to visit New Zealand. He found such field for his brush that he remained here for the next two and a half years. Christmas exhibited widely within Australia and New Zealand in the 1890s, earning a rising reputation as a "painstaking and skilled artist" able to capture "a picturesque side in common places.

Christmas revelled in the mountain and lakeland scenes he found in New Zealand, seeking out the remote (he remarked how "if you get off the beaten track it means hard work, and it takes it out of you if you are not accustomed to mountaineering' He valued the assistance of of local Maori. He returned to Australia in 1897 with some 500 sketches of the scenery he had encountered which, it was said, "will provide him with material for five years without taking another sketch'

He lived in San Francisco around 1900 and again around 1915. He was an avid traveller, but spent the last two years of his life in Hawaii, where he painted landscapes including dramatic volcano scenes. Christmas died in Honolulu in 1918.