Collection Articles
The Watercolour Collection
Pleasure Garden. 1933. Frances
Hodgkins. Watercolour. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu. Presented by a group of subscribers, 1951. |
The Gallery's Watercolour Collection had modest beginnings, but
over the past 70 years it has grown steadily by gift and purchase
and, of all the Collections, still maintains a largely traditional
emphasis. When the Gallery opened in June 1932, just 28 of the 128
paintings on display were watercolours and, of these, 11 were by
British artists and 17 by New Zealanders. Among the mostly nineteenth
century British watercolours were those by Helen Allingham, Edgar
Bundy, Matthew Hale, Laura Knight, William Lee Hankey and Ernest
Waterlow. In contrast, the New Zealand watercolours were by mostly
contemporary or early twentieth century artists and included works
by James Cook, Olivia Spencer Bower, Margaret Stoddart, Maude Sherwood,
Eleanor Hughes and Alfred Walsh. The foundation Watercolour Collection
included two paintings of larger than usual dimensions. William
Lee Hankey's We've been in the Meadows all day (1184 x 878mm) and
Charles N. Worsley's Mount Sefton (996 x 1105mm) are still greater
in scale than any other work in the Watercolour Collection.
Later in 1932, a further seven watercolours were added as part
of the James Jamieson Bequest, which included a work by Australian
artist Hans Heysen and expatriate Owen Merton. Throughout the 1930s
and 40s no purchases were made and the growth of the Watercolour
Collection depended on gifts and bequests, such as the Robert Bell
Bequest of 1943, which gave the Gallery a work by Henry S. Tuke
and Sunlit Estuary (1897) by James Nairn. However in 1949, with
a Picture Purchase fund having been established, there was the greater
opportunity to begin to structure the Collection. The first watercolours
purchased through this fund were West Coast Wellington by Nugent
Welch and Wellington Coast by Thomas A. McCormack. These purchases
were made at a time when the acquisition of the most celebrated
watercolour in the Gallery's history, Frances Hodgkins' Pleasure
Garden, was being hotly debated. It was not until 1951 that the
work would be accepted into the Collection.
In that year, the Gallery purchased two watercolours by Eric Lee-Johnson
and through the remainder of the 1950s and most of the 1960s, watercolours
by other New Zealand artists were added, including works by Juliet
Peter, Esther Hope and Russell Clark, whose work The Gathering was
an important purchase in 1958. Gifts and bequests of watercolours
were also accepted during the 1950s and 1960s. Most of these were
by British artists, among them George Cattermole, Charles Dixon,
Samuel Prout and John Nash. Perhaps the most important gift of that
period was the gouache Farmyard by Frances Hodgkins, which was presented
in 1964 by the Contemporary Art Society of London.
We've been in the Meadows all day,
1902, William Lee Hankey. Watercolour. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu. Presented by the Canterbury Society of
Arts, 1932. |
With the implementation of a collection policy in the 1970s, attempts
were made to fill gaps in the Watercolour Collection and works by
a number of colonial artists including William Fox, John Kinder,
John Barr Clarke Hoyte and John Gully, as well as contemporary practitioners
in the watercolour medium such as W. A. Sutton. Olivia Spencer Bower,
Gretchen Albrecht and Rosemary Campbell were sought and acquired.
From the 1980s until the present this policy has continued and attempts
have been made to strengthen the representation of artists already
featured in the Watercolour Collection and to introduce others who
have hitherto been unrepresented. Works by artists such as Nicholas
Chevalier, John Kinder, M. T. Woollaston, James Fitzgerald, R. A.
Oliver and Rita Angus are just six of a large number that have been
added in recent years.
In 1998, the Gallery was given the opportunity to purchase 20 watercolours
by Olivia Spencer Bower from the Olivia Spencer Bower Foundation
and, since then, the Foundation has generously archived several
hundred further watercolours for the future benefit of researchers
on this artist. Similarly, with the W. A. Sutton bequest in 2000,
the Gallery received a number of watercolours by other artists that
had been in Sutton's private collection. This gift was the culmination
of ongoing generosity by an artist who stands as one of Canterbury's
foremost watercolourists. Other gifts by Sutton included 116 works
from his magnum opus in the watercolour medium, made in Italy during
1973 and 1974. In 2002, although the Watercolour Collection is still
not large in comparison to other collection areas and traditional
practitioners of the medium are still collected, there is now a
resolve to focus also on works by contemporary New Zealand watercolour
artists.
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