Cass is an oil painting of a tiny rural railway station in mountainous inland Waitaha Canterbury on the way to Arthur’s Pass. It is the work of Ōtautahi Christchurch artist Rita Angus, who painted it in 1936 while staying at the Cass Biological Field Station with two artist friends. Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū acquired the work in 1955.

This painted canvas on board artwork sits in a wide cream-coloured frame. The work is 46 centimetres wide, about an arm’s length, and 37 centimetres high. It is organised in a symmetrical way, with one side of the composition almost seeming to reflect the other. In the middle, a small, red, shed-like station sits on a grey platform. In the bottom third of the painting, the railway line, its tracks obscured from the viewer by tussock grasses, runs across the work at a gentle angle. To the right of the station are two large power poles, often used in Aotearoa New Zealand landscape paintings of this period to show human presence in nature. Behind the station stands a neat triangle of young, dark-green pine trees. These elements are dwarfed by the peaks rising beyond them to the left and right of the picture, creating a V in the centre where white clouds swirl in a blue sky as the nor’west wind comes over Kā Tiritiri-o-te-moana, the Southern Alps.

There are other details. On the edge of the platform sits the small figure of a man wearing a brown coat and hat in the classic angular tailoring of the 1930s. Beyond the station to the right is a field with a rugby goalpost; to the left is a house – signs of life in the small settlement. On the tracks to the right is the end of a railway truck. This is matched on the left by the truncated view of a railway shed. In front of the station is a pile of timber waiting to be taken away.

Angus is known for her distinctive, graphic style, clear light and simple, bold colours. All these are evident in Cass. She uses opposite colours – blue and orange, yellow and purple, green and red – to make the painting feel vibrant. The warm, rusty red of the station pops in front of the cooler green of the pine trees behind, making the picture appear more three-dimensional. The cool blue-purple of the mountain and hills contrasts with the warm yellow-gold of the tussock. At the very bottom of the painting, rich, buttery yellows and clumps of thin fan-shaped paint strokes in grey represent grasses in a simple, stylised way.

Many people know the station from travelling to Te Tai Poutini, the West Coast, on the TranzAlpine scenic express: the train slows, and the onboard-guide talks about the painting. Always a great favourite at the Gallery, in 2006 Cass was voted ‘New Zealand’s greatest painting’ in a national television poll.