Homestead, Lake Wakatipu, Queenstown, no.2

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Edward Friström was well travelled. He was born in Sweden, and though little is known of his art education, he may have trained in Germany before painting in France and Spain. He arrived in Auckland from Brisbane in about 1903 and stayed twelve years, including a spell teaching at Elam School of Art and Design. He travelled widely while in New Zealand, returned to Australia several times, and visited the United States before settling in California in 1915, where he spent the rest of his life. For professional artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such transience was common, and even an integral part of the search for new subject matter and new markets. Contemporaries of Friström’s who criss-crossed the Tasman include Petrus van der Velden and Girolamo Nerli.

Friström first travelled to Otago in 1905 and probably revisited it two years later. Although it is not known whether these two works were painted at the same time, they are depictions of the same scene in very different styles. Homestead, Lake Wakatipu, Queenstown, no. 1 is an open-air impressionist image painted on the spot. Probably done quickly, its deft, sketchy brushstrokes convey the light-filled atmosphere in which grass, road, trees and sky are given equal emphasis. Friström captures the characteristically bleached Central Otago landscape with an unusually pale palette similar to that used by Australian impressionists Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts.

New Zealanders including Frances Hodgkins and the late James Nairn, who also worked in an impressionist style, preferred darker peacock blues and greens.

By contrast, Homestead, Lake Wakatipu, Queenstown, no. 2 focuses on the formal qualities of shape and colour. Its arrangement of curved bands of flat colour outlined in black is characteristic of Toulouse Lautrec’s art nouveau posters, and Friström’s unusual painted frame emphasises this decorative bordering. The harmonious flow of subtle greys, greens and the yellow sky is sharply interrupted by the rectangular red roofs. The inky black bushes reduced to stylised curves are vigorously painted and may be precursors of Friström’s paintings of New Zealand native trees in the art nouveau style.

Jane Vial