Alfred Wilson Walsh
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1859, d.1916
In The Otira
- 1905
- Watercolour
- Presented by the Canterbury Society of Arts, 1932
- 393 x 281mm
- 69/44
- View on google maps
Location: Sir Robertson and Lady Stewart Gallery
Tags: clouds, landscapes (representations), mountains, natural landscapes, rivers, snow (precipitation), trees
Alfred Walsh spent much of the 1904/05 summer painting outdoors at Ōtira during his break from teaching at the Canterbury College School of Art. This work reflects his passion for painting outdoors, capturing the dramatic landscape’s shifting light and sense of movement directly from nature. One of Walsh’s students later recalled: Over the paper with its chaotic mass of flowing colour, he was a wet worker, his brushes guided by instinct […] darted here and there designing, taking out, putting in all those telling blobs of colour which went to making one of his exquisite landscapes.
(He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil, 2025)
Exhibition History
Nature's own voice,6 February – 26 July 2009
Alfred Walsh was an early advocate for plein-air painting in New Zealand and developed his own distinctive style –famously described in 1904 as ‘aggressively splashy’. He worked predominantly in watercolours and enjoyed travelling to the Kaikoura coastline and the Arthur’s Pass region on summer camping and sketching trips with other artists. Walsh was one of the foremost plein-air painters in Christchurch and encouraged a generation of Canterbury artists, including Sydney Lough Thompson and Raymond McIntyre, to paint outdoors.