Exhibitions
Events
On display
Reading the Swell
Petrus van der Velden The Leuvehaven, Rotterdam 1867. Oil on canvas. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased with assistance from Gabrielle Tasman in memory of Adriaan and the Olive Stirrat bequest. Purchase supported by Christchurch City Council's Challenge Grant to Christchurch Art Gallery Trust, 2010.
Talk
Past event
Meet at the front desk
Free
Join curator Peter Vangioni for a discussion about Reading the Swell and discover more about this exhibition.
Drawing its inspiration from the sea, this exhibition highlights the Gallery's collection of maritime paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and ceramics, alongside scrimshaw from Canterbury Museum's collection.
This event forms part of the Gallery's late night Wednesday opening.
Related reading: Talk, Free event
Exhibition
Reading the Swell
3 September 2016 – 6 February 2017
Drawing its inspiration from the sea, this exhibition highlights the Gallery's collection of maritime paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and ceramics, alongside scrimshaw from Canterbury Museum's collection.
Collection
William Lionel Wyllie The Sloping Deck
A ship founders on rocks in the midst of a storm; those aboard clamber to the bowsprit’s highest point. Vigorous brushwork and a churning sea add to the sense of terror and uncertainty. Artist William Wyllie was a lifelong sailor and a leading marine painter of his generation, and painted The Sloping Deck when he was just twenty.
(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)
Collection
Julius Olsson Moonlight
This work depicts St Ives Bay. To the right is Godrevy lighthouse.
Collection
Petrus van der Velden The Leuvehaven, Rotterdam
Petrus van der Velden turned to painting full-time in 1867 after six years as a struggling self-employed lithographer. “The first year was the hardest, and at the end I had done a picture; the harbour and the ships”, he later recalled. Exhibited in Rotterdam and then the Antwerp Salon, it sold to “an English gentleman … for 300 guilders [£25]. Quite a fortune!”
(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)
Commentary
Reading the Swell
The art of the sea has always been the art of vastness—without edges and with potential for infinite extension. It is this immensity that has invaded the Reading the Swell exhibition; finding its way through the automatic doors when no one is looking and quietly expanding the walls. Like sailors, artists have laid soundings in this uncharted vastness. Reading the Swell is a small and pointed selection of those soundings that see fit to make sense of the sea.
