Peninsula, winter

Archibald Nicoll made a significant contribution to the Canterbury school of painters, and was a noted portrait painter as well as a landscape artist. Through his positions at the Canterbury College School of Art, as director from 1920 to 1928 and teacher from 1934 to 1945, he was a dominant figure for two generations of Canterbury artists, including Rita Angus, Rata Lovell-Smith, WA Sutton and Olivia Spencer Bower. Nicoll’s paintings, especially his images of Canterbury, are representative of a longstanding type of traditional landscape painting that dominated popular taste in New Zealand and won prizes such as the Bledisloe Medal for landscape art and, later, the Kelliher Art Award. Nicoll himself was awarded the Bledisloe Medal in 1932.

Late in his career as an artist Nicoll stated, ‘My philosophy of painting hardly amounts to a philosophy at all but is something much simpler than that. To set down selections of shapes and colours of objects seen in Nature has for most of my life been a normal natural thing to do.’39 The shapes and colours of the Canterbury landscape were certainly the richest source of imagery for Nicoll’s landscape painting. He constantly returned to certain motifs, and depicted them in all seasons. In this manner his work echoes that of the Barbizon school of painters in France who chose the humble and the familiar, creating pure landscapes of the countryside around Fontainebleau. His technical facility, assured draughtsmanship and appreciation of colour ensured that the familiar and the straightforward were given a substantial presence. In Peninsula, winter the rendition of sunlight and shadow on the snow is finely balanced with the warmer browns and greens. So too is the composition with its low viewpoint, which underlines the mass and height of the hills but does not allow them to dominate. The location of this painting has been identified as the Akaroa hills, a favourite place for Nicoll. It would have been completed in his studio at 97 Cambridge Terrace, Christchurch, from a series of smaller sketches made on location.

Tony Mackle

This essay originally appeared in Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2009).

1. Archibald F Nicoll, Year Book of the Arts in New Zealand, no. 3, 1947, p. 41.