Prominent Christchurch painter Bill Sutton was an influential teacher from 1949 to 1979 at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Arts. Sutton has chosen here a restricted palette – ochre, brown and black – to portray this aged wooden façade under streetlight glare, with a reflected neon glow of red.

The Manchester Private Hotel, already rundown when Sutton painted it in 1954, was a somewhat disreputable boarding house on the corner of Manchester and Southwark Streets on the outskirts of central Christchurch. Belonging to a series of paintings that Sutton made depicting old, inner city buildings, it conveys the imprint of memory and the local past.

(Above ground, 2015)

Arriving in Christchurch from Paris in 1925, Henderson immediately started painting her new environment. The works that have survived from her first few years in this country reveal a young artist determinedly working her way through problems in painting – structure, form, light and colour. Manchester Street, Christchurch is painted from the rooftop of an adjacent building, and is an accomplished study in tone and architectural perspective. “As a young painter I would paint forms for about a year, then change to a different type of form,” she said. “I wanted to clarify certain points in my own production.”

(Louise Henderson: From Life, 27 June – 11 October 2020)

Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s The Drawbridge is one of sixteen plates from a folio of prints depicting imaginary prisons that has repeatedly haunted and inspired writers, artists and architects for over two and a half centuries. Three of Piranesi’s Carceri engravings, for example, were included in Alfred H. Barr’s exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936.

First issued in 1749–50, but attracting little attention to begin with, the series was republished with heavily reworked plates in 1761, yielding darker, more detailed and more resolved prints that brought an attendant increase to their public reception and acclaim. (Above ground, 2015)

Christ Church Cathedral, a defining symbol of this city since its consecration in 1881, was designed by the English architect George Gilbert Scott, with input from the local supervising architect Benjamin Mountfort. In its present earthquake-damaged state it represents a significant challenge for this city’s church, civic and cultural leaders.

James Fitzgerald and the younger John Mills Thomasson were both British-born commercial artists who settled in Christchurch: Fitzgerald in 1923, after twenty years in Auckland, and Thomasson after serving in Mesopotamia (Iraq) during World War I. Both produced etchings of local Christchurch views and exhibited with the Canterbury Society of Arts.

(Above ground, 2015)

Many artists have depicted this city’s urban spaces, including Ivy Fife, who studied at the Canterbury College School of Art from 1920 to 1931 and taught there from 1936 until 1959.

Fife captured the clamour of Christchurch’s railway station on Moorhouse Avenue during the new Queen’s royal visit. Opened in 1877, the station had been a handsome structure, but by 1954 its Venetian gothic arches were under lean-to additions and its brick warmth covered in paint. Demolition came five years later; its replacement, a landmark modernist building, was itself demolished after the Christchurch earthquakes.

(Above ground, 2015)

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, son of a Venetian stone- mason and master builder, trained in architecture and stage design before moving to Rome and training there as an engraver. Producing many picturesque Grand Tour views of Rome, he was hugely influential on the classical revival in European architecture. In Rome in 1755 he befriended the visiting architect Robert Adam, who praised Piranesi in a letter to his brother in London:

'[S]o amazing and ingenious fancies as he has produced in the different plans of the Temples, Baths and Palaces and other buildings I never saw and are the greatest fund for inspiring and instilling invention in any lover of architecture that can be imagined.'

(Above ground, 2015)

James Fitzgerald moved from England to Auckland in 1903, and then twenty years later to Christchurch, where he established his own commercial art studio. His watercolour view captures Christchurch’s Cathedral Square at its most architecturally cohesive and complete. Many will remember the United Service Hotel at left, built in 1884–85, demolished 1990; fewer will recall the neoclassical Bank of New Zealand building at right, designed in 1866, demolished 1963. While it is possible to lament our general cultural attitude to architectural heritage, it is also difficult to imagine anything here, even if it had been protected, as capable of surviving the 2010-11 earthquakes that hit the city.

(Above ground, 2015)

L. S. Lowry’s best-known paintings present rhythmic crowds of ‘matchstick figures’ spilling across tightly constructed northern English industrial and urban landscapes. The sparser setting of Factory at Widnes presents one of Britain’s grimmest environments, a birthplace of the chemical industry. Some have interpreted the trio of strolling bowler-hatted figures as factory managers, others as perhaps visiting comics – Charlie Chaplin and transatlantic duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were still in the public eye when this was painted, and two of the three had performed in Widnes. Lowry had developed his own uniquely comical outlook over forty-two years while treading the streets of Manchester as a rent collector with the same company, from which he retired on full pension in 1952. This part of his story was long kept hidden from an admiring public.

(Leaving for Work 2 October 2021 - 1 May 2022)

Louise Etiennette Sidonie Sauze was a Paris-born and trained embroidery designer who moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1925 after marrying New Zealander Hubert Henderson, whom she had met in France. The next year, she started teaching, part time, design and embroidery classes at Canterbury College School of Art. She also began painting and exhibiting her work.Henderson was drawn repeatedly to gritty, industrial subject matter, which in her earliest exhibited works in 1933 included brickworks, rock quarries, city street views and a painting titled Industry. In 1940 she showed a work titled Decorative Study, Addington Workshops at the Canterbury Society of Arts. The painting here however is inscribed on the reverse in the artist’s hand ‘Addington Workshop, Christchurch 43’. The Addington Railway Workshops had opened in Christchurch in 1879 to assemble locomotives imported from England; the first built entirely in New Zealand was completed in 1889. The workshops closed in 1990.

(Leaving for Work 2 October 2021 - 1 May 2022)