The red shed, Jackson's orchard, Mahana

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

By the time he completed The red shed, Jackson’s orchard, Mahana in 1948, Toss Woollaston had been living in rural Nelson for nearly twenty years. The landscape was a constant source of stimulus, with its apple orchards, pine trees and views over the Tasman Sea, and he painted his favourite subjects repeatedly. Years later he remarked that he seldom succeeded in achieving what he wanted: ‘which was to reach at one stroke the essence of the feeling I had for the landscape; and to pay adequate homage to Cézanne, who mediated between it and myself’.1

The landscape depicted in The red shed, Jackson’s orchard, Mahana was well known to Woollaston, as he had worked as a labourer on Teddy Jackson’s orchard at Mahana during the early 1940s. It is nevertheless an unusual work, painted in warmer colours than the habitual earth-toned palette with which he attempted to evoke the sunlight ‘but after it had been absorbed into the earth’.2 The subject, too, is atypical. Buildings generally play a minor role in Woollaston’s early work, reduced to punctuation marks — dabs or patches of colour — in long-distance views that emphasise the linear rhythms of the landscape. Here, by contrast, the shed forms a pivot for the composition, a small solid object surrounded by a flurry of loose, sweeping brushstrokes. The exuberance of this work seems to anticipate Woollaston’s large gestural landscape paintings of the 1960s, in which his brushstrokes assume an even greater freedom.

In 1949 The red shed, Jackson’s orchard, Mahana was exhibited at the landmark McCahon–Woollaston exhibition at the Gallery of Helen Hitchings in Wellington, New Zealand’s first dealer gallery devoted to contemporary art and craft. This was a crucial exhibition for both painters, signalling their emergence as two of the leading local artists in the post-war period. Woollaston was delighted to sell two works, including this oil, which was purchased for £25 and donated to the National Art Gallery nearly twenty years later. Sales were the exception rather than the rule for Woollaston during the early part of his career, when there was little market for New Zealand art and even less interest in modern pictures.

Jill Trevelyan