Loan Exhibition Of Early N.Z. Paintings

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32265, 7 April 1970, Page 16

Loan Exhibition Of Early N.Z. Paintings

The Canterbury Antique Collectors’ Club and the New Zealand Founders’ Society have arranged a loan, exhibition of early New Zealand paintings in the Stewart Mali Gallery of the Canterbury Society of Arts. The exhibition contains 157 paintings, including a good number by the most influential artists to work in New Zealand in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

J. C. Hoyte, a popular painter in his own day, is represented by seven water colours that are very picturesque. From one painting to the next birds wheel in almost identical flight above water that never ripples. The surrounding neat, tree-clad mountains bask in a rosy glow.

John Gully (5 paintings), like Hoyte, brought his painting style to New Zealand in the 1860 s and imposed it on the landscape. At times their heavily detailed work is almost indistinguishable as belonging to one or the other, and whether we like their style of work or not its influence is to be seen In many of the paintings from their own and later genera tions.

The Dutchman, Petrus Van der Velden, perhaps the greatest figure in early New Zealand painting, is represented by five relatively minor works, but his ability to strip his subjects to essential elements is evident even in the smallest of these.

No 108, “On The Beach,” by Van der Velden, is a masterly little textural essay. A water colour of wheat stooks is the only painting by the Scottish impressionist, James Nairn, in the exhibition. But it is enough to show his virility and confidence as a painter It is worth remembering in Uoking at this exhibition that t 1928 Archibald Nicoll was moved to write that “in the

beginning were Van der Velden and James Nairn,” and in the same article Nicoll notes that “a chuckle may be extracted from the reflection that the foundations of art in this ultra-English community were laid by a Dutchman and a Scot.” His assessment of the role of Van der Velden and Nairn within the Context of this exhibition anyhow seems only partly right, for it makes no allowance, for example, for the wonderfully fresh painting of A. H. O’Keeffe, the Dunedin artist born in 1858, whose rich and fluent use of paint apparently rests as much on his own ability as on any single influence, or the work of Nerli and his influence on Frances Hodgkins. Goldie Paintings Given pride of place in the exhibition are several paintings by C. F. Goldie. Goldie is an anachronism in New Zealand painting. Bom in New Zealand but trained in Paris, it comes as a shock to find that he was still painting Maori figures in traditional dress in the early 19405.- His work is blatantly sentimental, yet continues to bring the highest prices at sales of New Zealand paintings. Of the works on display he does, perhaps in a way not intended, make some social comment in “The Heir Apparent,” No. 138. In this painting the figure of a small Maori boy leans against the earved posts of a meeting house.

Naturally in an exhibition of this kind many of the paintings have more historical interest than artistic value, but whatever their place in the order of things this exhibition should have wide appeal for members of the public and students of New Zealand painting alike. The exhibition will remain open from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. until April 9. —G.T.M.