Juliet Peter
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1915, d.2010
North Canterbury Pastoral Scene
- 1943
- Oil on canvas
- Judith Willet Ensor bequest, 2006
- 764 x 956mm
- 2006/013
Location: Contemporary Collections Gallery
Tags: animals, dogs (animals), equestrians, farms, headscarves, hills, horses (animals), landscapes (representations), natural landscapes, people (agents), women (female humans)
Juliet Peter was born into a farming family in Waitaha Canterbury and spent her childhood at Anama station near Te Kiekie Mount Somers. Preparing to sit her final exams at the Canterbury College School of Art, Peter’s artistic aspirations were temporarily sidelined by the outbreak of World War II. New Zealand’s support of the war effort was all-encompassing, and in 1942 she began work as a ‘land girl’, replacing male farmworkers serving overseas. While employed at Rydal Downs in Ōkūkū, she and her co-workers took up tractor driving, ploughing, harvesting, mustering, shearing and wool sorting. It was hard, physical work with long hours, six days a week throughout the year. Her years on the farm returned her to early and happy memories of rural life, and she documented her time at Rydal Downs through a series of paintings and sketches.
(He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil, 2025)
Exhibition History
Beneath the Ranges, 18 February – 23 October 2017](https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/beneath-the-ranges)
Juliet Peter was born into a farming family in mid- Canterbury. She spent her childhood at Anama station near Mount Somers until the early death of her mother, and her teenage years were spent in England with her older sister and brother and an aunt. Returning to New Zealand, she studied painting at the Canterbury College School of Art from 1936–40 and graduated in wartime. For the war effort, Peter joined the New Zealand Women’s Land Service to become a ‘Land Girl’ at Rydal Downs near Okuku. The Land Girls’ life at Rydal Downs saw Peter engaged in almost every aspect of keeping a mixed sheep and grain farm operational, including most of their own food production. Remarkably, Peter also found time to record something of their everyday activity through a series of paintings and pen-and-ink sketches.