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)

In 1958, Colin McCahon spent several months in America, visiting numerous art museums to see historical and contemporary art from the United States and Europe. Returning to a wintry Aotearoa New Zealand, he struggled to readjust. Eventually he found solace and inspiration in memories of a place very close to his heart – the wild, wind-sculpted landscape of Aotearoa’s Far North. Oil paintings were followed by a series of ink wash drawings, painted on paper spread out over the floor like a continuous, unfolding frieze. They are dark and lonely images, full of longing and a sense of return. “It’s a painful love, loving a land,” McCahon wrote. “It takes a long time.”

(Absence, May 2023)

“The greatest of all lessons is to learn to see. Many are ‘colour blind’ till they have their eyes opened to nature’s lessons, which she is always trying to teach us. But we must always tell what nature says to us, simply and directly without pretence or falsehood. Tell the Truth. Christ was the greatest artist. His words and pictures are a simple telling of nature's lessons – they are always the Truth. ‘We reason with colours. Colours are dead’, but by telling what nature teaches us the dead colours enable us to express the wonders and beauties of the Creator’s work.”

—Petrus van der Velden

(McCahon / Van der Velden, 18 December 2015 – 7 August 2016)

Research for the exhibition Closer (16 December 2017 – 19 August 2018) resulted in the restoration of this work's original title. In Dutch 'Begrafenis in den winter op het eiland Marken' and in English 'Burial in the winter on the island of Marken'.

Petrus van der Velden’s funeral procession moves slowly across the snow-covered landscape of Marken. The black-clad mourners and casket form a dark, concentrated mass against an expansive field of grey and white, while the village behind merges with the winter sky. The scene is solemn, yet van der Velden’s care in observation gives the mourners an extraordinary immediacy, making their progress across the frozen ground almost tangible. When the painting was exhibited in The Hague in 1875, one reviewer praised van der Velden’s “truly brilliant debut” and described the scene as “deeply sombre. It is winter on the island of Marken. Nature has donned her shroud.” Another noted the contrast between “the black figures of the funeral procession and the expansive snowfield”, concluding that the artist must have witnessed such an event “in order to render it, so movingly felt, with such tragedy.”

Whose funeral?

For many years, the story behind Petrus van der Velden’s Burial in the Winter on the Island of Marken was unknown. Recent research by Marken historian Jan Schild has identified the man being laid to rest as Cornelis Kaars, a fisherman who died on 6 December 1871. Van der Velden appears to have begun developing the subject soon afterwards, returning to it over several years before completing the large painting.

Kaars’s widow, Jannetje, can be seen behind the sled and casket. She was heavily pregnant when her husband died and gave birth to a son eight days after the funeral; the child survived for less than a month.

Knowing the circumstances behind the funeral changes the procession of anonymous figures into a particular community bearing a shared loss. Van der Velden’s extensive studies of Marken and its people reveal an artist deeply engaged with the lives of those around him, transforming a tragic local event into one of his most ambitious and memorable works.

(Timeless: Treasures from the Historical Collection 19 September 2026 – 30 May 2027)

Colin McCahon produced his first lithograph in 1954, and in 1957 completed two suites of lithographs, including Van Gogh – poems by John Caselberg. He employed a commercial lithographer for these works with mixed results, likely due to the fact that he had little say in quality control with the printer. Nevertheless, it was ultimately a successful suite. Colin incorporated John Caselberg’s poem sequence, ‘Van Gogh’, into his drawings, writing the poem out across several sheets in his iconic handwriting, which he also usedin his paintings. Colin also worked with other print mediums, including a small potato print also in this exhibition, but it is his lithographs from the 1950s that were his most successful.

Ink on Paper: Aotearoa New Zealand Printmakers of the Modern Era, 11 February – 28 May 2023

Talking about his first visit to Ōtira in 1890, Rotterdam-born artist Petrus van der Velden later recalled, “For the first three days I did nothing at all but just looked, it took my breath away.” A highly skilled professional artist with substantial exhibiting experience in the Netherlands, van der Velden prioritised capturing or expressing emotion in his art over recording the physical features of the landscape. The awe-inspiring setting aided him in this pursuit – especially during stormy weather – and drew him back again and again.

He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)

The word ‘blind’ refers to a screen that cuts out light, but Colin McCahon also uses it to refer to an absence of vision. Questions of faith were important to McCahon and he often used references to blindness to suggest the inability to see the real essence and value of things. McCahon’s style was highly personal and distinctive. Blind V is part of a series of five works painted onto window blinds. The abstract forms have the feel of a beach and sky and it has been suggested that the ‘blindness’ which McCahon refers to was the inability of New Zealanders to really see and appreciate their own unique environment.

McCahon is regarded by many as New Zealand’s greatest contemporary artist. Born in Timaru, he studied art in Dunedin. He lived in Christchurch for a time, became keeper and assistant director at Auckland Art Gallery, then lecturer in painting at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, before taking up painting full time in 1970.