A narrow peep at New Zealand art

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XV, Issue 1, 1 May 1982, Page 15

A narrow peep at New Zealand art

SIR TOSSWILL WOOLLASTON

I cannot help wondering if it is wise to ask a mere artist to talk about painting, especially a present day one, who must have heard what Matisse said, that a painter should cut out his tongue. And, one as uneducated as myself who never even got his diploma of fine arts. Can you imagine Picasso talking to an audience for three-quarters of an hour on Mediterranean painting? I find it difficult to conceive. Constable, on the other hand, would have obliged with a talk of any length asked for, on ‘The Art’. But perhaps not on ‘English Painting’? His predilection for the expression ‘The Art’ seems to me to suggest that when he thought about painting it wasn’t particularly of its Englishness. The painting that elbowed his into second-rate positions at the Academy exhibitions would have been nowhere near as English as his was, and that despite the fact that it was a Dutch painter initially who had greatly inspired his landscape work.

The art favoured by the controllers of exhibitions in his time deliberately modelled itself on popular subject painting from Europe. It was immensely popular in England too, at the same time as it was dying of mannerism. Constable’s painting, most English, wasn’t so I suspect as a result of his worrying about whether it was so or not. I would be surprised to hear that the word ‘English painting’ had ever escaped his lips. Is it good therefore, I wonder, that the term ‘New Zealand painting’ is constantly on ours? It seems it might be a little like saying ‘Lord, Lord’, and yet being none of His. It is whether we paint well that matters, much more than whether it is New Zealand. If we do, then unconsciously some New Zealand quality may be found to have crept in.

In my own case it was two reproductions of European painting that first stimulated me in a definite direction. They were only small reproductions in black and white, in a late number of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia. I was thirteen at the time, I remember. When I first saw original painting—that is, other than reproductions—l was eighteen and had lost my way. My excitement at seeing Cezanne and Sisley at thirteen wasn’t even a

memory any more. Except some watercolours, what I saw at eighteen excited me less than I would have liked it to. It was the Suter Art Society’s spring exhibition in Nelson in 1928. It must have been a typical sample of New Zealand painting of the time; most of the exhibitors lived and painted in Nelson. If not they had and, moving away, had retained their membership.

The exhibitor I was most interested in, because I hoped to have lessons from him when I had saved up enough money to afford them, was an Englishman, Hugh Scott. He had lived in various places in the South Island, lastly Motueka, where I was working on an orchard, before coming to Nelson city. In Motueka he had known Mina Arndt, a notable painter who had died there in 1926 just two years before my arrival. I wasn’t to become aware of her work till some time later. In the Suter Gallery is a fine ‘Mother and Child’ of hers painted in magnificently strong swipes of surprisingly delicate colour. It seems only an accident that her work should have been done in New Zealand, it belongs entirely to Europe. Her figures are like European peasants, though modelled from local people. I should think Millet might have been her example. They are extremely good pictures. But her landscapes tell me nothing at all of Motueka except how the old hop kilns looked, buildings that I loved myself because of their old-world appearance. She painted them so much better than I ever would; and now they are almost all gone, replaced by tobacco kilns. But from her landscapes other than these I can get no feel of the place as I know it. Motueka, in those I have seen, is only a romantic European dream.

The picture I looked at hardest, those two days I stayed in town to see the exhibition in 1928, was Hugh Scott’s ‘lnterior of Nelson Cathedral’. The exhibition being closed by the time I got there the day before, I had filled in time by going up Church Hill and into the old wooden cathedral, painted outside with the Nelson Paint Company’s orange ochre. Inside I had a sense of green, religious gloom, very like being in deep bush on Mount Egmont. But next day I could find no green in Mr Scott’s picture. Its shadows were brown. And, in the arrangement of pews and rafters, there was an intimidating display of vanishing perspective; an advertisement of the desert of disenjoyment that, I had no option then but to believe, lay between me and the fulfilment of my desire to be an artist.

But two years later when I did come to live in town and had my long-awaited lessons, they were pleasanter than I might have expected. In outdoor landscapes, at which before long I began to excel in watercolour, vanishing perspective seemed to look after itself well enough. What they had dinned into me at primary school seemed to work well enough for ordinary needs. And apparently I paid sufficient attention to it in my choice of architectural subjects;

for when I made a drawing in 1930 of an old oast-house brewery just outside Motueka, it sold readily for thirty shillings to a local resident. In the 19705, when the building was falling down and they were trying to interest the Historic Places people in its preservation, there appeared my 1930 drawing in th e Nelson Evening Mail, over the caption ‘A Photograph taken about 1886’! Part of Mr Scott’s tuition was to encourage his pupils to go to the Suter Gallery and study the paintings there. They hung permanently on the walls, obscured only twice a year for a fortnight when the Art Society had its Spring and Autumn exhibitions on mobile screens in front of the permanent collection. Here for the first time I saw pictures that might be presumed to be of world standard. There were even RAs among them. I found I was always the only visitor when I went there, in the mornings so as to have the afternoons free for outdoor sketching. The gallery was unattended. It was situated in the Queen’s Gardens, and part of the gardener’s duty was to open it at 10 a.m. and close it again at half past four in the afternoon. This state of affairs lasted till 1932, when it was discovered one day that some boys playing in the Gardens had taken acorns into the gallery and pushed thirty-six separately through the rotten canvas of an old picture called ‘A Venetian Scene’, making thirty-six holes. Whether with or without intentional humour, the Evening Mail added in its report that the picture was valued at thirty-six guineas. After that, there was always someone minding the door when the gallery was open.

Opposite the door for forty years, in the best place, hung a picture by W. F. Yeames, RA, of John Wycliffe sending his monks out into England to distribute the first Bibles. There was a grey church and a greyer sky. The grass was a heavy green and Wycliffe and the monks were in black habits. He had a hat, they were bareheaded. Their hair and complexions were the only happy notes of colour in the large and dreary painting. One (or this one at any rate) couldn’t help wondering how they would get on if it began to rain after they had set out on their diverging journeys. The sky looked very lowering. When I met the secretary of the Board of Trustees in 1961 and asked him if it wasn’t time to remove the picture and hang something else in its place, his answer was that they would fear to do that in case they offended the public of Nelson.

But there were other pictures than that for me to look at in the gallery in 1930, even if they were not all by Englishmen or RAs. One of the best was a good, strong, honest watercolour by Frank Brangwyn, ‘An Eastern Port’. The dried drips and blobs of paint from the end of his blunt brush in no way impaired the goodness of his colour; dirty whites, a dark dull-blue sea and a sort of khaki-grey

sky, all in roughly horizontal bands with the red funnel of a ship central enough to be interestingly off-centre. There was another picture by this artist, an oil of some romantic imaginary castle, chocolate-boxy in the extreme, though I hadn’t learnt then to use that critical description. I think he was an RA too, and for that sort of rubbish rather than the watercolour I liked. If so, his fame didn’t survive strongly enough for his name to be included in the encyclopedic dictionary I have just looked up.

My favourite picture in the gallery was by a Dutchman who came to New Zealand and painted here. It was painted thinly in oils, ‘Head of a Cello Player’, by Petrus van der Velden. Its subtle greyish sea-green background, the old man’s parchment-coloured complexion and his white hair—white like a waterfall —made a beautiful colour harmony. It was so good that I never tired of looking at it. Possibly the cello playing had little to do with the painting, beyond that an impoverished old musician may have sat for the artist. For me, that picture easily won all the respect, if not worship, that was asked for for the watercolours of John Gully, which the gallery had in plentiful supply. He was an Englishman resident in New Zealand, a surveyor-cum-artist. His subjects were panoramic views with mountains. He had shared the nineteenthcentury watercolourists’ addiction to fleeting colours, and it was already recognised that his pictures were fading. In front of each major one was a brown curtain that you might draw aside to look, and then replace to prevent further fading. This act, so like uncovering a shrine, failed to produce in me the sense of awe I felt was expected. Somehow, in spite of the wonders of nature they depicted, the pictures themselves remained uninspiring. Very different was my response, years later, to the work of another surveyor-artist, Charles Heaphy, when I saw a print of his view of Mount Egmont from the South. The mountain soared as it never could have done if the surveyor with his instruments of measurement had sat as heavily on the imagination of the artist as he had in Gully.

Gully and van der Velden: they were poles apart in the same gallery. Gully had numerous pictures, van der Velden only two. Gully had no figures (unless some minute, incidental ones escaped my notice); van der Velden’s pictures were both figure subjects. Gully worked only in watercolour; van der Velden’s pictures were both in oil, even though I long thought one of them was a watercolour.

The other one, called ‘The Storyteller’, was a picture Hugh Scott recommended us to study. Its background, possibly of bitumen, was a fault in van der Velden. Pictures painted with it had been known to slide off their canvases on to the floor because bitumen

never dried. But the colours glowed richly against it. The storyteller’s ruddy complexion, his blue eye, and the just perceptible blue of his sou’wester and sailor’s jacket, were good. He was painted more roughly than his hearers, two young people whose bemused expressions were helped by the suave smoothness of the paint. It was an interesting contrast, reminding me of a painting of my Aunt Marian’s (an unrecorded New Zealand artist as far as I know) in which she had the same kind of contrast, but to the point of exaggeration.

Her subject was more high falutin than van der Velden’s but her painting I suspect not so good. It had come to her by way of a vision, she told me, at an Anzac Day service. She shook her head to see if it would go away; but it was still there and a Voice (my aunt was a spiritualist) instructing her what measurements to make the picture. The figure of Christ, she quoted to me, had to be seventeen inches high. He was standing on the far side of the River Styx which flowed, van der Veldenly dark, down the middle of the picture from a lurid red sunset in the distance. On the near side of the mythical river were soldiers, coming in from the right roughly alive still, but dying on the bank of the river and then being rendered in smooth paint, as spirits. When they reached that stage, they were each allotted one of two expressions; joyful recognition of Who it was on the other side of the river if they had listened and believed at their mother’s knee as infants, and led pure and blameless lives as a result; or fear and horror if they had not believed, and grown into rough, swearing men.

The expressions were masklike, my aunt (like myself) lacked an art-school training. But it may have been a primitive. Who knows, in these days of art fancying and the elevation of the inept, the simple and the naive, what a treasure, if it had survived, that picture' might not be in some important collection? As far as I know it didn’t survive. When my aunt wrote to me from a home for the aged asking me to be responsible for her lifetime’s collection of what seemed to the rest of us mostly useless bric-a-brac, with perhaps odd items of more interest among it, I was financially unable to make the trip from Greymouth to Wellington. I suppose the picture was buried in a rubbish tip in some deep gully and is now far beneath a street of new suburban houses.

Nobody, in those days, seemed to worry whether our painting was New Zealand painting in the way we do today. A phrase, ‘The Church of England in the Province of New Zealand’, seems to express the situation very well, translated into terms of painting. Before I left Nelson, Hugh Scott was saying how much New Zealand artists would profit by the working visit to our country of ‘a great European painter’. He would show us how to paint our

own landscape. In a few years one did come whose current popularity was great enough to suggest he might be the answer. He was an Englishman, with the fascinating and beautiful name of Lamorna Birch. His visit should have been like a visit by the Archbishop of York or Canterbury might have been to the Anglican Church. But something went wrong. It began to be said that our subjects didn’t suit him. Was it that he was too English for us, though we were trying to be as English as we could out here? If he had been French would it have been different? (Hugh Scott had wished for ‘a great European artist’.) Was English not sufficiently representative of a whole continent whose past contained painters of many countries —Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German, French—that the English had traditionally admired more than their own? Whatever the fact, the failure of Lamorna Birch’s visit made it look as though New Zealand might have to try to find its own way after all.

At Christchurch in 1931, where Hugh Scott had advised me to go to further my studies beyond his capacity to teach me, I found, again, English-type painting. The senior teachers at the Canterbury School of Art were all practising painters, perhaps more than half of them English born. The way of painting there was sober indeed, excitement taboo, academic virtues taking four years to acquire with a'diploma of fine arts the reward of every faithful and obedient student who stayed the course. I found that I had to know nothing, to be taught without alloy all that they knew there. I knew I could never get enough money to stay the course, so I contented myself with not wanting a diploma. It would lead to teaching and I didn’t want to do that, not if it meant teaching what I would have to learn to get it. With less freedom than I had enjoyed at Nelson I began to wilt. Here, my watercolours done outside classes got no approbation, except from one or two fellow students who liked them. To paint at all, apart from being taught, seemed slightly illicit. If one did, to show the result felt almost like indecent exposure.

This went on for me until November, when the 1931 Group Show appeared in the old Durham Street Art Gallery. There I saw painting that excited me, and I was unashamed of being excited. It excited me in the way the Sisley and the Cezanne had, in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia in 1923. But I didn’t remember that yet, I only knew I had found my way. I had no decision to weigh or choice to make: either this painting or the School of Art was irrelevant, and it was the School of Art. I made up my mind immediately to go to Dunedin next year, where one of the two principal exhibitors, Robert Field, lived. He taught there, at the King Edward Technical College. At the first sight of his work I had

lost a doubt that had been creeping into me, whether I was destined to be a painter after all. Hugh Scott had unwittingly sown a seed of it, when he said of my watercolours that I only sketched, that perhaps I would never do more than sketch, but if it turned out that way it wouldn’t matter. (I wanted it to matter, whether I became more than a mere sketcher or not.) And Cecil Kelly, one of the more talkative and approachable of the Canterbury teachers, had told me I started up too many hares and didn’t run enough to earth, or some such proverb.

In 1932, at Dunedin, I found that I was never talked down to in this way; and that I was in the centre of a group that was robustly critical of the jail-keeping type of art teaching prevalent elsewhere in the country. In fact it was impossible not to be in the centre of this group—it had no fringes. Outside was the hostile world. A member of it, in the person of A. Elizabeth Kelly (‘for portraits’, as her infinitely discreet advertisement in the catalogue of the Canterbury Society of Arts told you) came to rail at Bob Field for his bad example to the students of the country, on whom her husband’s livelihood depended. Bob, who was usually quite communicative, wouldn’t tell us what the matter of her communication had been; so we were left to suppose it had been too unpleasant for him to want to tell us. All we heard was her criticisms of the Dunedin tramway service and of the roughness of the footpath in Tomahawk Road, Andersons Bay, where Field lived.

His work had lately been featured in the influential quarterly Art in New Zealand, published by Harry Tombs in Wellington with the aim of showing New Zealanders what was being done by their artists. From their remarks to me about the Group Show the year before, I knew very well that the Christchurch gang would be very wroth at Field’s work being accorded equal status with their own in such a publication.

Referring to the work of this Society portrait painter who had taken the trouble to come and see their master, these young painters rudely and robustly styled her ‘Ponds Cream Kelly’! It was good to be able to participate in such criticism of a system which had so bored me that I had begun to doubt myself. I began to feel a new confidence. But, above all, it was exciting. Here, they were looking at good prints in colour of the very artists who had commanded my attention at thirteen, Sisley and Cezanne and many more—Van Gogh, Gauguin, Pisarro, Matisse, Van Dongen, Picasso; names I hadn’t heard before, and pictures that to look at sent me to the top of my feelings. If these painters were known in Christchurch, the knowledge had been carefully kept from students like me. There had been a conspiracy to suppress their influence.

I learned about the breakthrough these painters had made in France in the late nineteenth century, painting the way they believed in despite all but implacable opposition from a public and its art officers hugging the dregs of a three-hundred-year-old Renaissance, filling their pictures with literary allusions and virtuously smoothing their surfaces, till Cezanne roared ‘The finish of imbeciles!’.

The battle had reached England apparently about the time of my infancy. I read the writings of Roger Fry, an Englishman who defended these painters against the kind of hostility their work had met in France fifty years before and was meeting in New Zealand now. (It was 1933, I think, when I was walking down Willis Street in Wellington, almost deserted at six o’clock in the evening, and saw a knot of people in front of a shop, all excited and gesticulating. Thinking it must be an accident or a fire, I hurried to see. It was neither of these, but a small print of a Van Gogh in a picture-shop window. ‘Good God,’ the people were saying among themselves, ‘fancy thinking God ever made anything that looked like that!’) That was it: the function of art was to copy the look that God had provided things with. It is a good thing that God has now been relieved of the function of making things look as they did before the painting of Van Gogh: they now look much more like his painting than they did to those people in Willis Street in 1933!

I didn’t think at the time about Bob Field’s being English, too. Trained, I believe, at the Royal College of Art. For me his painting needed no nationality; nor that of Cezanne, or Picasso, or Modigliani. That they happened to be French, Spanish, or Italian was, to me, irrelevant information. If they had been African, Eskimo, or even men from Mars, I would hardly have noticed, their painting excited me so. If I was going to be able to paint like that what did it matter whether my painting was of New Zealand or not?

What a different English, anyway, was the work of Bob Field from that of Hugh Scott, Archibald Nicoll, Richard Wallwork, or the gentry of the Suter Art Gallery; an English revitalised by the influence of the French. And the French themselves? They were not even French, a number of the painters of the ‘School of Paris’. Van Gogh was a Dutchman, whose work was influenced by the Japanese. Modigliani was Italian, and he was influenced by African sculpture as was the Spaniard Picasso too at one stage. The new Renaissance of painting drew inspiration from all the world. Its artists came from many countries of Europe. Its influence was to spread to many beyond Europe during this century. One of them was born in New Zealand —Frances Hodgkins. In Dunedin in 1932 they were looking at prints of the new British

painters as well as at the French, and Frances Hodgkins was famous among them. The war that was waged against them here in New Zealand found a focus in a picture of hers when an advanced group in Christchurch bought it with a view to presenting it to the Robert McDougall Art Gallery. It was called ‘The Pleasure Garden’. It wasn’t a very large picture, and was pleasant in colour and texture. Its positive qualities were attractive. The only negative description that comes to mind is ‘inoffensive’. Yet the fight against its acceptance for the gallery reached enormous proportions, and went on for years. It began, I think, in the late thirties or early forties. It wasn’t over until well into the fifties, because some time after I went to live in Greymouth in 1950 the Westland Art Society had it for a fortnight, and asked me to look after it. The would-be donors adopted the strategy of sending it round all the art societies of New Zealand to test their reactions. I haven’t the date of its acceptance for the McDougall at hand, but it must have been well into the fifties. At any rate it wasn’t until enough members of the old gang had died and their places on the board of the gallery had been taken by others. They had literally fought to the death against their expatriate countrywoman because she had escaped from their prison. That her work, if recognised, might liberate others was their fear.

As late as 1960 on a visit to Nelson (I had a grant of money to paint there from the Association of New Zealand Art Societies) I found that there was still resistance to ‘The Pleasure Garden’. Some members of the Suter Gallery Board of Trustees had resigned over the presentation of another Frances Hodgkins watercolour to their gallery. But my instance was more private. In Riwaka, I went to visit an old lady who in our younger days had been the first to instruct me how to paint in watercolours. I hadn’t seen her for about thirty years, and was curious to find out if her work would still excite me as it did then. It didn’t and our conversation soon flagged. I cast round in my mind for something to revive it over the cup of tea she had got for me, and lit on Frances Hodgkins; another woman painter, a famous one. What did my hostess think of her work?

‘You know that picture, “The Pleasure Garden”,’ she began. Indeed I did, I boasted, I had had it in my house for a fortnight. It was most inappropriate, I went on, that such a great row should have developed and been sustained so long over such an inoffensive picture. She waited till I had finished, and then pronounced: ‘lt is an immoral picture.’ I was staggered. ‘But why?’ I asked. ‘There are people without any clothes on, walking in the garden.’ ‘Oh, those aren’t real people, they are only stone sculptures.’ But she had further objections. Had I noticed the objects on the table? I had to confess I couldn’t remember the picture in such detail. ‘Wineglasses

and cigarette ashtrays. I don’t drink and I don’t smoke and I shouldn’t have to look at such things in my pictures.’ I was staggered again. ‘But’, I protested, weakly, ‘if the subject-matter of a picture is going to be what makes it immoral would we have to jettison, for example, most of the work of Toulouse-Lautrec?’ She had a magnificent round voice, rather like a penetrating fog-horn. She used it now to terminate the conversation. ‘Who is he?’

Whether she meant that he was unworthy of consideration, or just didn’t know of him, it was impossible to say anything more except to ask whether she would like to come with me in my car next day. I was going sketching up the Takaka Hill. She accepted with delight; she had told me how she suffered from lack of transport. We took our lunches. When it came time to eat, she went to the farthest part of the space available and ate out of a brown paper bag with her back to me. When we packed up our work to go home she looked at mine and said, ‘l’ve never seen anybody use so much colour as that!’

When I came back to Nelson after 1932 and showed Hugh Scott some prints I had bought or been given, he was more displeased with Cezanne than with Van Gogh. I might look at Van Gogh, he wouldn’t do me any harm; but not at Cezanne, he couldn’t draw! Years later I was reminded of that when I came across a remark attributed to Whistler. His response, when someone showed him a drawing by Cezanne, was that ‘if a child of five had drawn that on his slate, his mother, if she were a good mother, would have whipped him’. (Incidentally, Hugh Scott claimed to have known ‘Jimmy Whistler’.) From then, my friendship with him and his lovely wife had to be conducted without reference to painting. They were our neighbours, after he had had a stroke and come to live in retirement at Ruby Bay.

Nelson prided itself on its reputation of being an art centre. That may have been valid once, in terms of polite colonial gentility; but the refusal to accept influences made it latterly a hollow term. Everything wears out or goes flat without injections of new vitality. In painting, this comes from other painting as well as from the subject the painter chooses. A situation exactly the opposite of the Nelson one was indicated by E. C. Simpson, writing about 1940 in Art in New Zealand on Colin McCahon. ‘ln McCahon’, he wrote, ‘the influences meet.’ If, as many believe, Colin McCahon is our greatest, or our first great, New Zealand painter, Mr Simpson’s comment may well indicate why. If it does, then it seems to follow that New Zealand painting thrives on influence.

But there is the other side to it; it has to be strong enough itself to bear the influences without being merely a reflection of them. Maybe it is the fear that this might happen that makes some people

too chary of any influences; and ignorance of it that makes others too ready to be influenced by what is fashionable. Yet, like it or not, we are all influenced. We cannot avoid it. When the passage of influence is free it is all right; but when it is restricted by adherence to outworn tradition, or artificially stimulated by fashion, it isn’t so good. And when an admired painter’s manner is imitated as a device to secure success it is even worse. These troubles will always be with us; the mere naming them will not exorcise them. This ensures that it will always take good, hard, long looking to find out whether any painting is really good enough to outlast its period.

When I was offered a travel grant in 1961 for one year’s tour of Europe and America, I hadn’t clarified the points I have just made, and wanted to convert its use from travel to time to paint at home. I had wanted very much to go to Europe in 1934; but I hadn’t been able to go then, and now I had become reconciled to staying in New Zealand. My own painting had developed here, ‘in contact with nature’, but stimulated by examples from overseas. I had made a virtue of necessity, and felt a little impatient of the prevailing idea that it was absolutely necessary to go overseas to learn how to paint in New Zealand. ‘Overseas’ had come to me, I had made my selection from what was offered and developed my painting accordingly, though not enough. All my life I had had to spend the best of my time working at other things to earn a living for myself and my family, and I knew that now I could use a thousand pounds to better advantage painting at home than going on an expensive trip to get a closer look at what I knew well already. And, if I went, I would gravitate to the art that had already been instrumental in forming me. (Rembrandt, Constable and Cezanne, I decided I would concentrate on to avoid spreading my looking too wide and too thinly.) I was too old and too set in my ways at fifty-one, I felt, to seek to be formed again differently by what I might find that was now modern overseas.

But the then Arts Council wouldn’t listen to my pleas. I discussed it with Charles Brasch, who was a member of the committee that had to consider my case. He suggested I should give him a letter to present at their next meeting. No doubt I wrote it well and made my case strongly; but they were far too addicted to the view that they could do no good to anybody except by sending him overseas. I don’t believe they even thought about what I wrote. Their reply was, abruptly, that if I didn’t depart for overseas the following year at the latest I would forfeit the grant. I thought rapidly: the newspapers would report my receipt of the grant; that would increase my reputation; his reputation being the chief (or only) means of selling an artist has, my sales and my income would

increase, and so I would be able to spend more time painting. I accepted the grant on their terms. I went overseas, and enjoyed it. My first Rembrandt I saw in Madrid, where I had gone because I had read that the pictures in the Prado there were the best preserved in the world because of the climate. The Rembrandt was surprising because of the colour. I had always thought of him as rich and brown; but this picture called, I think (I kept no notes), ‘Saskia as Flora’, gave me an impression of greenish white. It was in a small room in the right wing of the building. While I was looking at it from across the room an old couple, probably from the Antipodes, doing the tour of their lives like me, came in. They walked close to the pictures, he reading, or attempting to read the titles (they were in Spanish). They looked at each picture for a second or two, short-sightedly, she a couple ahead of him. At the ‘Saskia’ he stopped and called her back. ‘Come and look at this, dear —Rembrandt!’ But she wouldn’t. She was firm with him. ‘lf we spend too long looking at any one picture, we won’t see them all.’

I am wrong about this being my first Rembrandt; it was my second. I had seen one, a self-portrait in old age, at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia in 1958. It was a Rembrandt of the brown sort. It had moved me far more than this Saskia did, bubbling with inward laughter as I was, and yet washed with inward sadness at the behaviour of that elderly couple of tourists.

But it was Goya (despite my intention to concentrate on only three painters) who took command of my eye in the Prado. I could only look incidentally there at Velasquez or El Greco. I made a special trip out to the Florida Chapel to see his frescoes there, which I knew from a book. It was there that a delightful old custodian, when I pleaded to be allowed to stay longer than he wanted me to, answered my plea (that I so loved Goya that I had spent fourteen days in the Museo Prado, looking at his work there) by sweeping his arm round the walls of the Florida and saying ‘Goya superior’.

I did not encounter Cezanne in the original until I got to London, the National Gallery. There, I am ashamed to say, I fell asleep in front of his ‘Dovecot at Bellevue’. Overcome by the artificially heated air and the deep upholstery of a round leather seat, I wearied of fighting for a glimpse of it between brightly-garbed tourists. It was better at the Courtauld Institute; but even so I had got so much already from prints of Cezanne that contemplation of the originals, though undoubtedly luxurious, couldn’t do much more for me, not at first anyway; and I wasn’t going to have time to repeat the experience year in and year out, as I would have done if I had lived in Europe. My best Cezanne experience was reserved until I saw ‘The Bathers’ at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, and marvelled at the blues in it. They reminded me of the windows

of Chartres Cathedral, which I had recently seen and could not buy a postcard of because it didn’t even remotely suggest the experience of seeing the original.

It was an experience that dogged my whole tour, the inability to buy a postcard (or even a more expensive reproduction) of anything just after I had been looking at it because then it was so unsatisfactory. Yet till then I had survived on nothing but reproductions of the paintings I loved. A certain ‘Sketch for Salisbury Cathedral’ by Constable, that I had vowed to see, eluded me in London. All they had at the Victoria and Albert Museum were the white ones; either the sky, or the spire, or both, too white for the other colours he used. The one I wanted to find had been reproduced in colour in a little book over the caption ‘Painting did not again reach these heights until Cezanne’, a sentiment I had heartily endorsed. It was in Birmingham I found it, in the art gallery there. It was beside the doorway between the eighteenth century and nineteenth century rooms. Dr Mary Woodward, the director, saw my reaction and asked me, ‘Was that worth coming to Birmingham for?’ Indeed, it was. Then I looked on the opposite side of the doorway and saw another Constable, even more wonderful. It was called ‘Sketch for the Cornfield’ but it bore little resemblance to the popular ‘finished’ painting of that title, with its engaging detail of the dog, and the boy lying down to drink from a puddle. This painting was too deeply self-concerned to surface in recognisable detail. The paint in its sky boiled like a grey scum, the tree trunks writhed upward as in some druidical forest. The atmosphere was timeless, prehistoric. The colours were right for one another in it, there was no discrepant note of obvious realism. We haven’t had painting like that in New Zealand —nor, often, anywhere in the world.

I was away four months, not long enough to feel homesick. I felt I could have lived in any of the countries I visited, particularly Spain, and painted there. If I had, how different would my painting have been, I wondered, from what it is? I noticed, in Athens and in Florence, that art for tourists was no different from what we offer here in shops and in art society exhibitions. Only the subject is different. This low-level painting seems to have a universal style. I suspect that the same is true of painting at a higher level, too. Nationality, when discernible, is not the most important feature of painting.

After I had been back in New Zealand for a few years I was taken for a drive to Waihou at the eastern extremity of the Bay of Plenty. On the way back my host directed me to go and ask permission to look at the carvings at the Maori meetinghouse at Te Kaha for a quarter of an hour, while he visited a friend. But the Maori lady at

the gate would not let me in. I stood in the road for a quarter of an hour, looking at what I could see over the fence. Not since looking at El Greco in Toledo, Goya in Madrid, Cezanne in Philadelphia, had I had the peculiar feeling I recognised as happening when I looked at great art, a feeling of being distended in the invisible part of my being, a feeling almost physical. It was happening to me again, in Te Kaha. This feeling I had totally lacked in the Casa El Greco, in Toledo, the day I went there to look at him because Goya couldn’t spare me in Madrid. How did I find out that the El Grecos in the Casa were fake? Firstly, by the absence of this sensation of being made bigger than I had been before I looked. Then by several material circumstances that, taken together, confirmed it. They were all the same size, small-medium. They were hung at eye level, easy to see. They were not varnished or glazed, and so reflected no light. Nowhere yet, especially elsewhere in Toledo that day, had I found great paintings that were so easily accessible. ‘The Burial of Count Orgaz’ in the Church of St. Thomas was about fifteen feet high, varnished to a pitch of high reflection, and beamed on by floodlights. From the best position I could find, I could see about two-thirds of the picture. The rest was reflection. As I sat quietly looking at it for about three-quarters of an hour, I became aware how much it goes wrong in reproductions in books, because they are too small. In them the rhythms of the painting suggest a writhing knot of worms. In the painting they are like heavenly theatre, dance on a grand scale.

Two young American friends I had picked up on the bus that morning sat with me. They were students and the boy could speak Spanish. We felt like rocks washed by waves, as guided tour after guided tour came in and sat round us listening to their guides and went away. And a beautiful and funny thing happened; two Mexican boys I had met at Escorial the Sunday before, because they could speak English and came with the English-speaking guide, sat in the pew in front of us. At Escorial we had agreed that guided tours were things to avoid. And yet here they were, in another. We greeted each other with pleasure and surprise. ‘I thought you weren’t going on any more guided tours,’ I said to them. ‘Never again, never again!’ they answered.

At the Casa El Greco, the guides were stricter with their charges than here, where the painting was a genuine one. There, indulgence was brief, each guide telling her tour: first, that ‘This picture was painted in fifteen hundred and ninety-five’ after which a brief wait would produce an ecstatic sigh, ‘How old!’; and secondly, ‘This is the picture he was working on when he died.’ Before the thrill this produced had time to die down, words like a run of machine-gun fire sent the flock scurrying for shelter from any feelings of unreality

that might have crept in: ‘We must hurry, there are many more rooms in the Casa El Greco and many more things to see in Toledo and the bus will leave sharp at five o’clock!’ We started to laugh. The usher saw us, and came from the door to tell us he knew, too. He pointed out the signature of the copyist (not that of Domenicos Theotocopoulos at all) on the nearest painting. Afterwards, walking down a narrow street, we saw one of the same sort in a shop window. It had a price on it. ‘How much would that be in English money?’ I asked my new friend. ‘About twelve pounds.’

If I have diverted you from the consideration of New Zealand painting you might have thought proper to this talk, then I apologise. But my excuse is that the tour overseas has become so much a required ingredient of New Zealand painting that I felt I must tell you about mine. What it did for me I leave you to decide. It came so late in my life that my style was already developed, past radical change. I think I may defy anyone to detect any radical difference in my work before and after 1962.

Had there been an Arts Council when I was twenty-four, and had they then elected to send me overseas, the change might have been radical. But there was not. Instead, ‘overseas’ in the person of Miss Scales, a student at the Hans Hoffman School in Munich, came to Nelson that year and I got all I could from her. The change in my work was radical.