Landscape (Wanaka)

In the year that this work was painted, Rita Angus spent four months staying in Wānaka with her friends Marjorie and William Marshall. Marjorie Marshall was a fellow painter who Angus had met at art school. William was the teacher at the local Wanakā school. During the visit, William would drive the two women out on weekend painting expeditions into the surrounding countryside.

This work shows Angus’s remarkable skill as a watercolourist. Hills, hazy in the distance, are shaped with perfectly contoured washes of fluid paint. Impossibly fine lines pick out leafless winter trees, and the rise and fall of a picket fence. Angus leaves flecks of paper unpainted to form bright white highlights, dotted through a vivid green pasture.

For more detail on Angus’s visits to the Marshalls, see: Jill Trevelyan, Rita Angus: An artist’s life (Te Papa Press, 2nd edition, 2021), pp. 107-115.