Central Otago

Rita Angus paints the entire region of Central Otago into this dense canvas, loaded with layers of colour. Colour, scale, and perspective change constantly – from the huge tree on Lake Wakatipu, to the craggy red outlines of the Kyeburn Diggings in the lower half of the work. Angus has captured the vastness and variety of the Otago landscape, as well as the shifting effects of summer heat, light, and wind.

The work was commissioned by the composer Douglas Lilburn - a close friend of Angus’s. In February 1953, Lilburn paid for Angus to spend three weeks travelling through Central Otago by bus. Angus painted watercolours of the places that she visited. After returning to her studio in Christchurch she began the mammoth task of stiching those watercolour views together to form this one, ambitious, composition.

Angus worked on the oil painting for years. She periodically asked for Lilburn to return it, once writing, “Please continue to have patience in completion of this work – square inch covering tons of earth & space, sometimes taking several hours”. (Rita Angus, letter to Douglas Lilburn, 18 June 1954, referenced in Jill Trevelyan, Rita Angus: An artist’s life, Te Papa Press, 2nd edition, 2021, p. 271).