Notes
Angels and Aristocrats

Angels and Aristocrats

Blair Jackson and I attended the opening of Angels & Aristocrats at Dunedin Public Art Gallery on Friday 27 April. It's spectacular.

Notes
Taking Stock

Taking Stock

It's hard to believe, but only eighteen collection works were damaged as a result of all earthquakes, with fourteen damaged on the 22 February 2011.

Collection
Nathaniel Webb, Esq., of Roundhill Grange, Charlton Musgrove, Somerset

Artist Unknown Nathaniel Webb, Esq., of Roundhill Grange, Charlton Musgrove, Somerset

Nathaniel Webb, the subject of this striking 300-year-old portrait, was a Bristol merchant who – like many of his peers in this period – is known to have made a vast fortune through West Indies sugar and slavery.

Webb’s portrait was donated in 2007 by a direct descendant, in honour of her father John Jekyll Cuddon, a respected Christchurch chartered accountant. The painting came to New Zealand with Henry Joseph C. Jekyll, who immigrated to Canterbury in 1862, and in 1880 purchased a large parcel of farmland beyond the edges of Christchurch, naming it Dallington after an old family estate.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)

Collection
Panier de Raisins

Henri Fantin-Latour Panier de Raisins

Henri Fantin-Latour’s Panier de Raisins evokes the abundance of midsummer and an atmosphere of unhurried pleasure and respite. Every June from 1878 onwards, once the clamour of the Paris Salon had subsided, Fantin-Latour and his wife Victoria (née Dubourg) closed their city apartment and headed to rural France, and a small country house in Lower Normandy, to paint until summer’s end. Henri Fantin-Latour sent the best of his new still-life paintings to his dealer in London, where they found a ready audience.Fantin-Latour produced over 800 fruit and flower paintings between 1862 and 1896, nearly all of which sold in England – the paintings for which he is most highly regarded were unknown to his countrymen. As the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche protested in 1919, “For too long, they were not found in France; Fantin was revealed to us only through rare portraits and fantasies.”

(Persistent encounters, March 2020)

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