ART IN OTAGO

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26713, 6 March 1948, Page 6

ART IN OTAGO

FASCINATING SURVEY EXHIBITION NEXT WEEK The Centennial Exhibition of Otago Art, a survey of the achievements of Otago artists during the last 100 years, is to be opened at a private view in the Hocken Wing of the Otago Museum on Monday night. The GovernorGeneral. Sir Bernard Freyberg, and Lady Freyberg are to be present. From Tuesday the exhibition is to be open daily to the public. The pictures displayed will naturally be very wide in their range. They will begin with the earliest picture of the Otago landscape, the work of le Bi-eton, who visited Otago with D'Urville's expedition in 1840. It shows the Maori settlement at Otakou and the whaling ships at anchor. The treasures of the Hocken library have been made available to enable the earliest Otago pictures to be displayed, and the story of art in the province is to be carried a step further with selections from the pictures of the early surveyors, many of whom were gifted draughtsmen. In the absence of cameras, they drew their pictures to give intending settlers an idea of what they were coming to in their new land. G. B. Shaw, the first piofessional artist in Otago, who arrived in 1851, will be represented by a fascinating water colour view of Dunedin, and there will be a series of pictures by artists who visited Otago at the time of the gold rushes. It will be possible to detect the progress which followed the establishment of a School of Art in the seventies, and a wide variety of pictures, including cartoons and newspaper illustrations, will show the development of art in Otago up to the present day.