B.

Urban landscape was uncommon subject-matter for Toss Woollaston, who became best known for his atmospheric natural landscapes, which were characteristically energetic fusions of hills, water and sky. The exception was a series of works created following his arrival in Māwhera Greymouth, painted from his own front veranda, looking out across the town. Woollaston had previously been living with his family in Mapua near Whakatū Nelson, and moved to Greymouth in December 1949 through an opportunity to support his family as a ‘Rawleigh’s man’, a door-to-door travelling salesman of ointments and health products. Writing to his wife, Edith, on the day he arrived, he described Greymouth as “a crowd of grey churches and buildings at all angles, with high green and bushy hills just as sharp and angular rising behind – not mine yet”. He was joined by Edith and their family a few months after arriving. By 1952 when he sent this work off to the 1952 Group exhibition, he had evidently overcome his earlier expressed reservations.

(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)

This pared back, strikingly modern Madonna and child was painted in the Christchurch suburb of Phillipstown where Colin McCahon, perhaps New Zealand’s most acclaimed twentieth-century artist, lived with his family between 1948 and 1953. In contrast to the typically grander, often lavish treatment of this traditional subject within art history, McCahon’s composition is personal and startlingly bare, reduced to two naked figures framed within a rough oval that emphasises their close and enduring connection. Without haloes, thrones or attending angels, their identity is alluded to only through their grave sense of purpose and the work’s uncompromising title.

McCahon gave There is only one direction to the renowned writer James K. Baxter and his wife Jacqueline, marking the friendship between the two families and McCahon’s position as godfather to their young daughter Hilary. The painting sat above Baxter’s writing desk for many years.

(Unseen: The Changing Collection, 18 December 2015 – 19 June 2016)