ABSTRACT

During the years my wife and I lived in New Zealand we travelled quite often and virtually covered the two islands from north to south, from Cape rainga to Bluff, and enjoyed the often spectacular scenery of the country. Not only was I impressed by the volcanoes in the centre of the north Island and the almost perfectly shaped cone of Mt Taranaki, the glaciers and mountain ranges of the Southern Alps including Mt Cook, but also by the breathtaking views of the large lakes in Southland, the rolling hillsides of northland and the huge basin-like valleys of Central Otago, the vast outlook across Banks Peninsula or the intricately shaped Otago Peninsula. having experienced these sights, I realized how attractive the New Zealand scenery must always have been to artists, poets as well as painters, and I began to visit art galleries and museums and started buying books on landscape painting. Their number and the variety of thematic approaches chosen to present the abundant richness of New Zealand scenery testifies to the sheer pleasure of artists in sketching or painting — either on the spot or from memory — the details of a scene that had evoked their aesthetic pleasure and triggered their artistic sensibility and execution. As David Filer pertinently observed in the introduction to his richly illustrated book, Painting the Frontier — The Art of New Zealand’s Pioneers:

When european explorers and settlers arrived in New Zealand, they immediately began recording this unique country with pen, pencil and paint brush [because they] were fascinated by the dramatic landscape (2009: 7).