LANDSCAPE ART IN NEW ZEALAND 



Birmingham Municipal School of Art, has been ten years in the 

 Dominion and may claim to be regarded as an Auckland artist. He, 

 too, has been catight with the beauty and wonder of nature as it appears 

 in " the roadless north." J. W. Ash (p. 92), another Birmingham stu- 

 dent, although not long in Auckland, has succeeded in catching the 

 spirit of the New Zealand landscape. 



Landscape painters in the Wellington district suffer under some dis- 

 abilities from the enclosed nature of their surroundings and the lack of 

 places to which to go. There are only two roads running out of 

 Wellington and these for many miles lie between steep, bare ridges, 

 there being little or no landscape of the ordinary pastoral nature. Yet 

 Wellington has produced its quota of landscape artists. Miss D. K. 

 Richmond (pp. i oo and i o i ) has ably carried the mantle of her father, 

 J. C. Richmond, and acknowledges the influence of Nairn, under 

 whom she worked for a year, subsequently studying under Norman 

 Garstin. Though her earlier work was chiefly executed in oil, she has 

 latterly worked almost entirely in water-colour. Miss Richmond does 

 not paint merely to please the public, for whom most of her work is 

 possibly too austere ; but though it has varied in style and manner her 

 compositions have been consistently gracious, dignified, and restrained 

 in colouring. She has achieved some distinctive results in her sketches. 

 H. M. Gore, the President of the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts 

 (p. 93), has for many years limited his attention entirely to landscape 

 painting in oils. His pictures are generally painted in quiet greys and 

 are reposeful rather than vigorous. There is a pleasing absence of 

 technical swagger in his work, for he recognizes that technique avails 

 nothing compared with a truthful representation of his impression. 

 Painting on sound conventional lines he possesses a keen eye for pictorial 

 compositions in landscape and a well-trained sense of perspective. 

 The newer men in Wellington belong chiefly to the landscape painters 

 of a little group of artists who run a studio and life class in Wellington. 

 They are known as " The Silverstream School," their habitat being at 

 Silverstream in the Hutt Valley, some seventeen miles from Wellington. 

 They are all plein-air artists and earnest students of nature. Among 

 them the work of Nugent Welch (p. 109) calls for particular attention. 

 Like H. M. Gore, Welch is a self-taught artist. In his oils he has 

 frankly followed the conventions suggested by the late Sir Alfred East, 

 of whose work he was a great admirer ; and though in these can be seen 

 his own method of self-expression, it is to his water-colours that we 

 turn to see the undiluted expression of his artistic self. Welch has tem- 

 porarily abandoned his work to do his duty to the Empire and its 

 Allies, and is serving at the front with the New Zealand Forces. 

 Fred Sedgwick (pp. 103 and 104), who might be termed the father of 

 the school and has done much to hold it together, has established a 



