Pareora riverbed

One of New Zealand's leading portrait and landscape painters, Archibald Nicoll  (1886-1953)was born in Christchurch and studied at the Canterbury School of Art under Sydney Lough Thompson. In 1908 he was appointed teacher at the Elam School of Arts in Auckland and in 1910 left for Europe. He studied at the Westminster School of Art, Edinburgh College of Art and later at the Scottish Academy School of Art. He exhibited with major exhibitions in Scotland and at the Royal Academy.

In 1914 he returned to New Zealand to join the Expeditionary Forces in World War One, and was severely wounded, losing a leg. After a brief period teaching in Wellington, he was being appointed Director of the Canterbury College School of Art in 1920 in which capacity he served till 1928 when he became a free-lance artist. He returned to the School as a teacher in 1933 and remained there till his retirement in 1945.

A traditionalist, Nicoll held no firm philosophy of art other than to 'set down selections of shapes and colours of objects in nature'. Stylistically he was an heir to a European tradition that reached back to Velasquez, but more direct influences were the portrait genre of Henry Raeburn and George Romney and the landscapes of James Guthrie and the Glasgow School. His landscapes and portraits, though seemingly gestural, were firmly structured, the outcome of careful observation. He was a dominant personality among his contemporaries and as a teacher exerted a strong influence on two generations of Canterbury artists.

The modestly scaled oil, Pareora riverbed, shows Nicoll at his most attractive to contemporary tastes. The locale is deliberately unspectacular - a dry riverbed in the flat South Canterbury landcape, about halfway between Christchurch and Dunedin.  It is freely, even sketchily rendered but with an absolute confidence and freshness. It really conveys the impression of having been made on the spot and the result of close, intelligent observation. It is a work that is genuinely difficult to date, because Nicoll's style, whether of 1920 or 1950, barely changed, but it no less effective for it.

The painting originally belonged to the family of Wellington businessman, print collector and major benefactor to the National Art Gallery, Sir John Ilott (1884-1973), and it was given to Te Papa by his daughter, Mrs Suzanne McKellar, in 1999.

Sources:

Neil Roberts, 'Nicoll, Archibald Frank', https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4n10/nicoll-archibald-frank

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   August 2018