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Remarkably, there is a photograph of Maud Sherwood painting this man: https://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/1706738. She obviously used him as a subject more than once – in the photograph she is painting an oil on canvas, rather than this fluid watercolour on paper. Sherwood must have asked him to model in her studio and then added in the background of Dutch houses, figures, and boat prows.
Maud Sherwood was born Maud Kimbell in 1880, in Dunedin. Her family moved to Wellington when she was a child, and she trained initially at the local Technical School where she showed great promise as a painter. Sherwood left New Zealand in 1911 and spent almost the entire rest of her life living as an artist in Europe and Australia.
In 1913, when Sherwood painted this work, she had been in Europe for two years – training and painting in France, England, and the Netherlands. During this time she worked with a number of other expatriate New Zealanders. She trained at Frances Hodgkins’ Paris studio in 1911, and in 1912 went on a sketching trip with Owen Merton and Cora Wilding. In the summer of 1913 she ended up in Brittany – a fashionable destination for artists looking for picturesque subjects, regional costumes, and local traditions. She wrote: 'Subjects simply tumbled over one another…I positively gloated over it all – Crowds of Breton women, all in their Breton costumes, & the men in lovely brown & blue clothes…were buying & selling, & strolling, & talking, & the sun shone'.
In this wonderfully atmospheric watercolour, Sherwood is enjoying something of the same energy from her Dutch subject. The man’s long clay pipe, wooden clogs, black hat and red kerchief all carry a certain romance – the sense of a local, long-lived culture being captured in paint.
Reference: Ann Calhoun. 'Sherwood, Maud Winifred', Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1996, updated May, 2002. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3s14/sherwood-maud-winifred (accessed 18 January 2023)