The French artist Henriette Browne excelled at painting highly realist, representational narrative paintings and La Lecture de la Bible is one of her finest. Browne produced several portraits of religious devotees and the two young women in this painting are thought to be novices studying to enter a religious order. They are clearly virtuous – their austere black garments suggest a puritan character and the painting is also known as The Puritans. The withered flowers on the table are the most obvious narrative element in the painting, these are a vanitas symbol for the passing of time and the loss of youth. La Lecture de la Bible was first owned by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoléon III, and was presented to the Gallery by its major benefactor, Robert McDougall.

(New Dawn Fades, November 2018)

First exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1857 with the title 'Les Puritaines', this painting has for many years also been known as 'La Lecture de la Bible'.

Treading a path well established in the 1850s by the Pre-Raphaelites, George Sheridan Knowles’s Glasgerion takes its direction from the tragic medieval romance in a lyric narrative of the same name. It was one of 305 English and Scottish popular ballads collected by Francis James Child and published between 1882 and 1898. Sheridan Knowles was among many late Victorian illustrators and painters inspired by the ballads. His large-scale depiction of the eager, soon-to-be betrayed lovers was widely admired when hung on the walls of the Royal Academy in 1897.

Glasgerion was one of six paintings brought to Christchurch from London in 1903 by the Canterbury Society of Arts, which set about raising funds to buy them. This was the first painting purchased, through a gift by local politician and businessman, John Thomas Peacock.

(The Moon and the Manor House, 12 November 2021 – 1 May 2022)

Although apparently portraying a refined Venetian lady – a young woman with carnival mask, black veil and shawl – this work was painted not in Italy, but England. Yorkshire-born William Frith, who became extremely well-known for his large, densely populated panoramas of contemporary English life, also painted small costume studies early in his career, often modelled on literary figures. Frith’s model in this work, painted in 1846, strongly resembles his wife Isabelle (née Baker), whom he married in York in June 1845; Isabelle sat for him several times. Isabelle Frith became a close friend and confidante of Catherine Dickens, wife of author Charles, who (although a friend of her husband’s) she later banned from entering their London home; this following the 1858 breakup of the Dickens’ marriage. The Frith marriage was also ‘troubled’: Isabelle had 12 children to William from 1846–60; his mistress Mary Alford had six more to him from 1855. (He married Mary in 1881, a year after the death of Isabelle.)

(The Weight of Sunlight, 16 September 2017 - 16 September 2018)

Alfred Drury modelled this sculptural bust after a friend’s daughter, and made numerous variations of it between 1897 and 1918. Most were cast in bronze, but some were carved in white marble. The Age of Innocence was first shown in Aotearoa New Zealand in 1903 and 1904 when Drury was completing a massive commemorative statue of Queen Victoria, commissioned for Wellington and unveiled in 1905. This version was purchased by the Canterbury Society of Arts at the 1906–07 exhibition, and is seen as reflecting the goals of the British New Sculpture movement, whose followers sought greater naturalism and symbolic qualities than found in the prevailing neoclassical approach of the time.

(Ship Nails and Tail Feathers, 10 June – 22 October 2023)

“Ki te kotahi te kākaho ka whati, ki te kāpuia, e kore e whati.” —King Tāwhiao [If there is but one toetoe stem it will break, but if they are together in a bundle they will never break.] While in Sydney in 1884, en route to England, King Tāwhiao had his photograph taken by Henry King. Vienna-trained, Bohemia-born painter Gottfried Lindauer obtained a copy in Aotearoa New Zealand and that became the source for this portrait.Tāwhiao’s kaupapa (intention) was to meet Queen Victoria, gain recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi, and redress the injustice of vast confiscations of Māori land – he was blocked, however, from seeing her.

(Te Wheke, 2020)