French-born Louise Henderson married a New Zealander and came to Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1925. She relished the freedom of her new life, exploring in and painting the hill country of Te Waipounamu and often sleeping out alone under the stars. In 1936, she undertook a ten-day painting trip to Cass, in the Southern Alps, with her friends Rita Angus and Julia Scarvell. Her translation of that landscape is alive with luminous colour and dynamic movement, capturing jagged ridgelines, undulating hills and the curving lines of telegraph wires. The mountain, its slopes depicted blue with shadow, is called the Pyramid – much easier to look at than to climb.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )

This work by Rita Angus has come to symbolise the hard-edged clarity of the Canterbury school of landscape painting. It was made following the artist’s ten-day visit to the remote high country railway settlement of Cass in 1936 with painters Louise Henderson and Julia Scarvell. The Canterbury style was also associated with an atmosphere of isolation and emptiness, often emphasised through small signs of human occupation and intervention placed within a much larger natural environment. While these aspects play an important role in Cass, the work also benefits from a sense of expectation, as we wait, with that solitary, overcoat-clad figure, for the train to arrive.

(Absence, May 2023)