Ivy Fife
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1903, d.1976
Royal Visit
- 1954
- Oil on board
- Christchurch Art Gallery Foundation Collection, purchased 1996
- 482 x 580mm
- L86/95
- View on google maps
Location: Burdon Family Gallery
Tags: automobiles, flags, people (agents), queens (people), railroad stations, royalty (nobility), urban landscapes, utility poles
A youthful Queen Elizabeth II became the first reigning British sovereign to visit Ōtautahi Christchurch, efficiently arriving (from Te Tai Poutini / the West Coast via Otira and Darfield) at the city railway station with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, at exactly 5.45pm, Monday 18 January 1954. The moment inspired a unique response from local artist Ivy Fife, whose deft, expressive mark-making captured something of its excitement and energy. Pictured in warm evening light beneath the distant Port Hills and pitched roofs of the Gothic railway station, a somewhat chaotic scene is held together through strength of colour, composition and brushwork.
(From Here on the Ground, 18 May – 17 November 2024)
Exhibition History
Above Ground, 18 December 2015 – 12 February 2017
Many artists have depicted this city’s urban spaces, including Ivy Fife, who studied at the Canterbury College School of Art from 1920 to 1931 and taught there from 1936 until 1959.
Fife captured the clamour of Christchurch’s railway station on Moorhouse Avenue during the new Queen’s royal visit. Opened in 1877, the station had been a handsome structure, but by 1954 its Venetian gothic arches were under lean-to additions and its brick warmth covered in paint. Demolition came five years later; its replacement, a landmark modernist building, was itself demolished after the Christchurch earthquakes.
Ivy Fife was a member of the group now called the ‘Canterbury School’, which in the 1940s and 1950s began to experiment with the theme of the building in the landscape.
Fife also often featured city events in her painting. Here, she records the January 1954 arrival to Christchurch of the young Queen Elizabeth II, who was met by a large and enthusiastic crowd at the city’s old neo-Gothic railway station in Moorhouse Avenue. This building opened in 1877 but was demolished in 1959.
Ivy Fife was born in Christchurch and studied at the Canterbury College School of Art from 1920–31. In 1936 she became a member of the college staff, teaching landscape painting, a position she held until her retirement in 1959. In 1954 Fife was appointed to the Robert McDougall Art Gallery advisory panel. Her work was exhibited widely throughout New Zealand and she was represented in the 1951 Festival of Britain, held in London, in the ‘International Women’s Art Club’ exhibition.
(Label date unknown)
Related reading: Above Ground
film
Ivy Fife - The Queen's Visit
The Queen arrived in Christchurch on 19 January 1954 at Christchurch Railway Station, the scene depicted in this painting. She then moved up Colombo Street by car through crowds ten deep. Commentator Bernard Kearns describes the scene in Cathedral Square and then at the Clarendon Hotel when the public in Christchurch had their first sight of their new monarch.
Audio supplied by Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision.
Notes
The Queen's visit by Ivy Fife
This article first appeared as 'Hello and goodbye' in The Press on 5 October 2012.
Notes
Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee
When the SS Gothic docked in Auckland on 23 December 1953 with the Queen and Prince Philip on board, New Zealand went completely mental.
Notes
Yertle the Turtle by Glen Hayward
This article first appeared in The Press as 'An Ode to Yertle the Turtle' on 13 May 2015.
Notes
Louise Henderson, Addington Workshops
For many years, the piercing whistle of the railway workshops off Blenheim Road was Addington's alarm clock.
Notes
New exhibition: Shifting Lines
Here's a little from behind the scenes. Shifting Lines opens tomorrow, 9 November, and runs until 19 January 2014. It's a show about drawing as an idea, which is permitted here to take very different forms. It includes work by six artists – Andrew Beck, Peter Trevelyan, Katie Thomas, Pip Culbert, Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano – all of whom use line to investigate space and structure in unexpected ways.
Notes
Rooftops, backyards, urban scapes
As a supplement to the article in today's Press GO section, highlighting the recent purchase of Ivy Fife's Untitled (Towards Worcester Street from St. Elmo Courts), here's a modest selection of paintings of rooftops, backyards and urban scapes from the collection...
Notes
Factory at Widnes by L.S. Lowry
This article first appeared in The Press on 13 October 2004
Laurence Stephen Lowry painted Factory at Widnes in 1956, at which time he was Britain's most famous living painter. Lowry's fame increased in that year as he became the subject of a BBC television documentary, though his work had already been popular in British homes and schools as reproductions since the end of the war. If appreciation for his individualistic painting style was widespread, there was also fascination with L.S. Lowry the artist, who had projected in the press the image of a lonely recluse.
Commentary
Above Ground
I go into the Gallery. Haven’t been there in a while. Building closed. It was open to begin with. Civil Defence HQ in the weeks following the shock that laid the city low and who knew glass could be so strong, so resilient? Then the Gallery closed. It was cordoned off, behind wire netting. Something was going on in there. Someone said something had cracked in the basement. Someone said they needed to insert a layer of bouncy forgiving rubber beneath glass and concrete, ready for any future slapdown.
Commentary
City of Shadows and Stories
If cities are the ground into which we plant stories, the soil of Ōtautahi – later Christchurch – is undergoing a protracted tilling season. Five years is a long unsettlement in human terms; on a geological (or indeed narratological) scale, time moves more gradually. Christchurch exists today as a rich aggregation of narratives, propping up physical edifices of crumbling stone and cardboard.
Article
Shifting Lines
It's where we live: the encrusted surface of a molten planet, rotating on its own axis, circling round the star that gives our daylight. Geographically, it's a mapped-out city at the edge of a plain, bordered by sea and rising, broken geological features. Zooming in further, it's a neighbourhood, a street, a shelter – all things existing at first as outlines, drawings, plans. And it's a body: portable abode of mind, spirit, psyche (however we choose to view these things); the breathing physical location of unique identity and passage.
Article
De-Building
For many passers-by, Christchurch art Gallery is identified by its dramatic glass façade—the public face it presents to the world. but De-Building is an exhibition that offers a very different view. bringing together the work of fourteen artists from new Zealand and farther afield, this group exhibition draws inspiration from the working spaces gallery-goers seldom see: the workshops, loading bays and back corridors; the scruffy, half-defined zones.