item details
Overview
In the late 1920s Rata Lovell-Smith began to represent the Canterbury landscape in a new way, using localised imagery, which she treated in a simplified and modern manner. Arbutus berries is one of her earliest still lifes, and it was completed when her reputation as a landscapist was at its height.
Lovell-Smith attended the Canterbury College School of Art. In 1922, at the age of twenty-seven, she married Colin Lovell-Smith, an artist with a background in lithography. The couple regularly painted together, and developed a style based on free handling and atmospheric effects that challenged mild-mannered impressionism. It set the course for regional painting in Canterbury. In 1929 art critic GM Lester championed their approach, explaining that the Lovell-Smiths did not seek to imitate nature but selected from its patterns, arranging their selections into individual and creative compositions. The simplified forms, broad areas of colour and the ‘poster-like’ qualities in their work were key modern elements.
Modern art arrived here on various fronts: via New Zealanders who had worked in Europe, expatriate British art teachers on the La Trobe scheme and courtesy of The first loan collection of contemporary British art exhibition, shown in Christchurch in 1934. This provided the opportunity to study at first hand paintings by artists whose work had only been known from reproductions in books, including post-impressionists Charles Ginner and Spencer Gore, and Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant of the Bloomsbury set.
Lovell-Smith concentrated on formal concerns in Arbutus berries. Commonly known as the strawberry tree, the arbutus was introduced to New Zealand by European settlers and grows in public parks and private gardens. A striking characteristic is the variation in colour of the berries, which turn from green to orange to deep red as each cluster ripens. These become abstract shapes in the painting, as does the cropped framed picture and the vivid green foreground band. Their simplicity is offset by the vividly patterned drapery, which plays off against varied shades of leaves, while the red, orange and green berries create a vibrant arrangement of shapes and contrasting colours.
Julie King
Arbutus Berries is one of Rata Lovell-Smith's earliest still lifes, painted at the height of her reputation as a painter of the Canterbury landscape. She approaches this interior in the same way as she approached her landscape paintings, which were regarded by New Zealand critics in the 1930s as both adventurous and controversial. Her treatment of form and colour meant that her work was at times likened to 'posterish' commercial and graphic art.
A feeling of New Zealand
Drawing on developments in modern art, particularly the work of Cezanne and the Bloomsbury Group in Britain, Lovell-Smith and other Canterbury painters developed a kind of formalised naturalism that seemed particularly suited to the landscape in New Zealand. As an interior study, Arbutus Berries doesn't feature the presence of people and industry in the landscape that Lovell-Smith used to create her nationalist images, but it is still connected to the nationalist images through its simplicity of colour and composition. The fall of light defines the subject into planes and contours, each part of the composition appearing 'cut out' and distinct, with few tonal gradations or subtle handling of form.
Framing the painting
Arbutus Berries is one of the earliest paintings in Te Papa's collection that still has the original frame selected by the artist - a fine, simple, rounded frame painted the same red as the berries that are the painting's subject.