item details
Overview
This modest watercolour landscape is by Charles Decimus Barraud, a significant figure in the history of art in New Zealand. While it has the appearance of a quickly executed sketch, it demonstrates Barraud’s skill at blocking in a scene with confident washes of colour. There is a solitary figure in the foreground and the cottage appears to have a raupo-thatched roof. Comparison with other works that exhibit a similar restricted palette and sketchy composition suggest it dates from Barraud’s first decades in New Zealand. See for example Te Papa’s oil painting Settlement at Port Ross, Auckland Islands, 1850 (1992-0035-1650) or Alexander Turnbull Library's Pihautea, Wairarapa?, 1860s? (B-005-014).
Barraud arrived in Wellington in 1849 and established himself as a chemist, a practice that enabled him to access painting materials and also supply them for local artists. He came from a family of artists (two of his brothers exhibited with the Royal Academy in London), and became a key figure in colonial New Zealand’s art world. Barraud was a founding member of the Fine Arts Association of New Zealand in 1882, which was renamed the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in 1889, and served as its president from 1884 until his death in 1897. Barraud primarily worked in watercolours, and specialised, like most colonial artists, in views of New Zealand’s landscape.