This article first appeared in The Press on 27 July 2005

2005 marks the centennial of the death of one of Canterbury's notable Victorian watercolourists and architects, Thomas Cane (1830 - 1905). Cane was born in Brighton, Sussex and prior to his arrival to Canterbury in 1873 he had trained as an architect and quantity surveyor under the firm of Banks and Barry. He was also employed by one of the masters of the Victorian Gothic Revival architectural style, Sir Gilbert Scott, who designed Christchurch's Anglican Cathedral. Cane travelled widely throughout Europe on several occasions visiting France, Germany, Belgium and Holland with the direct purpose of studying medieval architecture. He is likely to have developed his skills as a watercolourist while working as a architect, which would have required producing detailed sketches of building designs.

Things are not always what they seem. What looks like the result of an artistic foray into exotic lands is, in fact, an 1894 portrait of a Christchurch busker who posed in the studio of Petrus van der Velden.

Textiles comprise a small proportion of the Gallery's Collections, yet they span a vast time period, combining Chinese antiques and 17th century appliqué with fabric-based work made as recently as 2000. The diverse range of practice is indicative of the evolution, in form and content, of textile-based works from objects dedicated to religious worship and domestic decoration to conceptual art objects which exist outside a strictly functional context.

If the question "what is the largest individual collection area numerically held by the Gallery?" was to be asked, the answer would have to be the Works on Paper collection, within which are 2145 original contemporary and historical prints, the earliest dating from the second half of the fifteenth century.

This article first appeared in The Press on 28 February 2007

Belgian Refugees is one of the first oil paintings that Frances Hodgkins ever exhibited, although at the time she was already well accustomed to showing her watercolours. Working in oils and tempera on canvas, she used an experimental technique in this work that gained much from her experience with watercolour. Believed to have been first shown as Unshatterable, in October 1916 at the International Society's Autumn Exhibition in London, the choice of title would suggest a greater sense of resilience than is actually conveyed by this family group. Here only the baby is oblivious to trouble, while his nursing mother seems devoid of expression, and the older children tense with anxiety or fear. Behind the group, a gap in the swirling grey suggests the fact of a missing father, and this steam and smoke speaks of displacement, the atmospheric backdrop of a train station or the symbolic clouds of war. Within the wall of monochrome, intense colour is reserved for mother and child, who also remind of one of Hodgkins' favourite early choices of subject matter in watercolour.