item details
Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
In 1927 Evelyn Page joined with a number of other younger Canterbury painters, including Ngaio Marsh and Rhona Haszard, to form The Group. An alternative to what they saw as the closed shop of the Canterbury Society of Arts with its conservative hanging committee, The Group gave Christchurch’s more progressively minded artists the opportunity to exhibit their works in a sympathetic environment. For fifty years, The Group’s annual exhibitions offered an important platform to successive generations of New Zealand artists, from Toss Woollaston and Doris Lusk to Tony Fomison and Philip Clairmont.
Like other members of The Group, Page initially maintained a foot in both camps, and Castle Hill, Craigieburn Range was first shown at the Canterbury Society of Arts’ annual exhibition in 1933. There, it probably would have gone largely unremarked, as the style that Page had learned as a student at the Canterbury College School of Art, where she studied from 1915 to 1922 under artists such as Richard Wallwork, Leonard Booth and Cecil Kelly, remains in evidence. Located ninety kilometres northwest of Christchurch, Castle Hill had long been a popular destination for painters. Signs of change are nonetheless apparent in Page’s work. Focusing on what she later described as the ‘solidified circus’1 of Castle Hill’s remarkable rock formations, she avoids the more conventional landscape devices of detailed foreground and expansive sky. This willingness to experiment is matched by Page’s flattening of the picture plane, and her use of solid areas of colour and wide, vigorous brushstrokes.
Castle Hill, Craigieburn Range was originally owned by composer Douglas Lilburn, a close friend and supporter of the artist, and colleague of her husband Frederick Page at Victoria University College’s School of Music. Lilburn donated the painting to the National Art Gallery in 1972. In his introduction to the catalogue of Page’s 1970 retrospective exhibition, Lilburn reflected on the place she held in the affections of many, stating that he was ‘glad to pay tribute to a personality whose warmth of spirit, integrity, searching awareness and painterly vision have greatly enriched my own experience’.2
William McAloon
1 Janet Paul and Neil Roberts, Evelyn Page — Seven decades, exhibition catalogue, Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch, and Allen & Unwin, Wellington, 1986, p. 79.
2 Douglas Lilburn, introduction to Evelyn Page retrospective exhibition, exhibition catalogue, National Art Gallery and New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts, Wellington, 1970, p. 5.