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Overview
These flowers were probably picked in Evelyn Page’s Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington garden. In the 1960s and 1970s, Page often used her house and garden as the setting for still life paintings. Her domestic scenes are alive with colour – as here, where the jug of flowers merges with the vibrant green bush growing behind it.
Evelyn Page (born Polson) went to art school in Ōtautahi Christchurch. A precocious talent, she began exhibiting her work in the early 1920s, shortly after graduating. In 1927 she joined other young Canterbury artists as a founding member of the influential modern art collective The Group.
In the late 1920s, Page became interested in impressionist painting. For the rest of her life she remained fascinated with the play of light and colour, and used distinctive, loose brushstrokes to capture this on her canvasses. The writer Charles Brasch described Page as a painter who ‘the world tossed continually in a riot of colour, form, sound…’.
Reference: Charles Brasch, Indirections: a memoir 1909-47 (Wellington, 1980), p. 252 quoted in Janet Paul and Neil Roberts, Evelyn Page. Seven decades (Christchurch, 1986), p. 29.