Roger Collins

My Favourite
Charles Meryon: Nouvelle Zélande, Presqu’île de Banks, 1845...

Charles Meryon: Nouvelle Zélande, Presqu’île de Banks, 1845...

1957 was a big year for me – transitions from a middle- sized hometown to life in a major city, and from high school to university, with an emphasis on courses in French language and literature. And late in that year a new display in the Canterbury Museum allowed my rudimentary interest in New Zealand history, my unstructured interest in the visual arts, and my commitment to things French, to come together around the work of an artist I had never heard of, but who had lived briefly at Akaroa in the 1840s – Charles Meryon.

Artist Profile
Charles Meryon: Etcher of Banks Peninsula

Charles Meryon: Etcher of Banks Peninsula

French explorers, natural historians, whalers and Catholic missionaries were increasingly present in the south-west Pacific from the mid-eighteenth century, but there was also a political thread in this activity. During the 1820s some in France saw New Zealand as a potential penal colony, and the project that saw a handful of French colonists settle on Banks Peninsula in 1840 made an official French presence in the region even more appropriate. This took the form of a French naval base, the ‘New Zealand station’, established at Akaroa in 1840.

Exhibition

Owen Merton: Expatriate Painter

A unique exhibition of paintings by landscape watercolourist Owen Merton.