B.

French-born Louise Henderson married a New Zealander and came to Ōtautahi Christchurch in 1925. She relished the freedom of her new life, exploring in and painting the hill country of Te Waipounamu and often sleeping out alone under the stars. In 1936, she undertook a ten-day painting trip to Cass, in the Southern Alps, with her friends Rita Angus and Julia Scarvell. Her translation of that landscape is alive with luminous colour and dynamic movement, capturing jagged ridgelines, undulating hills and the curving lines of telegraph wires. The mountain, its slopes depicted blue with shadow, is called the Pyramid – much easier to look at than to climb.

(Perilous: Unheard Stories from the Collection, 6 August 2022- )