If you were a painting student at the Canterbury College School of Art in the early 1920s, it was something of a rite of passage to visit the Glenmore brick works on Ōtautahi Christchurch’s Port Hills Road. Here, students would make studies of the clay pit as it was scraped into the Port Hills behind the massive kiln. One such student was John Weeks, who developed this large oil painting from plein air sketches made at the brick works. His emphasis on the bright, direct sunlight and contrasting shadows on the cliff face and foreground show his interest in depicting natural light.

(Timeless: Treasures from the Historical Collection 19 September 2026 – 30 May 2027)

Sentinels is a rare, early work by Thames, Coromandel-born Rhona Haszard. It shows her clear artistic vision and ability to make a sensitive, painterly response to a specific location. Haszard painted this impressionistic coastal landscape while at Canterbury College School of Art, where she distinguished herself as a star pupil between 1919 and 1924. This work was first shown in the Canterbury Society of Arts’ annual exhibition in 1923. Haszard left New Zealand two years later and began to make her mark as an artist in Europe, exhibiting in France, England and Egypt, where she moved in 1927 and died tragically young in 1931.

(Te Wheke, 2020)