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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
When he arrived in Christchurch in June 1890 Petrus van der Velden was a mature exponent of the late nineteenth-century Dutch romantic realist school of painting, commonly known as the Hague School. He was naturally attracted to sombre subject matter in landscape, portrait and genre studies. Van der Velden is best known for his paintings of the Ōtira Gorge region, deep in the Southern Alps, which he visited for the first time in 1891 and which provided him with a major source of subject matter for the remainder of his career. He found endless inspiration in the inexorable forces of nature, whether the tumultuous torrents of a mountain stream or, as in the case of Storm at Wellington Heads, the buffeting winds of a southerly gale.
In Storm at Wellington Heads, van der Velden introduces a human element: the seaweed gatherers braving the elements and the ferry on the horizon lurching in the stormy swell. This links the painting in mood and theme to an earlier series of paintings from the Netherlands. In these funeral scenes he depicted the harsh reality of the lives of the Marken fishermen and their families, and their often unequal battle with the forces of nature. Storm at Wellington Heads weaves together threads of style and sensibility, which pervade all of van der Velden’s paintings to varying degrees. The late Rodney Wilson noted: ‘For him [van der Velden] Otira and Marken belong together, and in a sense those works and the landscape share in common a suggestion of the infinite Creator’s presence in all creation, of the Creator’s power and our insignificance.’1
For the eight years he lived in Christchurch from 1890 to 1898, van der Velden was a catalyst in reinventing attitudes to art in the region, and his Ōtira Gorge paintings laid the foundations of the strong regionalist element in Canterbury art. Together with James Nairn and Girolamo Nerli, he had a profound role in shaping the broader directions of New Zealand art, particularly in the early decades of the twentieth century.
Tony Mackle
In this dramatic painting Petrus van der Velden explores the themes of the sublime, a genre of painting which deals with subjects like the insignificance of humanity in the face of nature. Storm at Wellington Heads has all the classic elements of the genre. The foreground figures struggle against the overwhelming storm, and the painting is resolved in a series of oppositions of light and dark in the sea, sky, and rocky coastline.
A Dutch modern
Van der Velden was already an established artist in the Netherlands when he emigrated to New Zealand in 1890. Of van der Velden's work, Vincent van Gogh wrote: 'There is something broad and rough which appeals to me very much - something of the roughness of torchon [a coarse textured paper].' Storm at Wellington Heads illustrates van der Velden's vigorous style which, contrary to appearance, was carefully achieved. The artist would execute many pencil, charcoal, and watercolour studies before undertaking a large oil painting like this one.
New visions of the landscape
Van der Velden is best known for his series of landscapes of the Otira Gorge, Canterbury. Storm at Wellington Heads brings the feeling, power, and meaning of the Otira Gorge images to a different subject. Van der Velden's approach to local landscape was persuasive, and he made a large impact on art in New Zealand, especially in Christchurch, where he set up a studio, and in his teaching laid the foundations of the Canterbury regionalist school of painting.