Douglas Lilburn

This is a portrait of the composer Douglas Gordon Lilburn. Born in Whanganui in 1915, Lilburn wrote his first compositions while a student in Christchurch. In 1937 he travelled to London to study at the Royal College of Music, where he was a student of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Lilburn returned to New Zealand in 1940 – becoming one of the country’s only professional composers.

Rita Angus met Lilburn in Wellington in 1941 and their relationship quickly became one of the most foundational of her life. A strong believer in the connections between different artforms, Angus saw Lilburn’s music as intimately linked to her paintings. She often wrote about the effect of listening to his compositions, and saw Lilburn as her soulmate: an artist with a similar vision and commitment to their work. Although Angus and Lilburn had a short-lived affair when they first met, Lilburn was gay and did not want to continue a romantic relationship. The two remained close as friends until Angus’s death in 1970.

This watercolour is the only portrait that Angus ever completed of Lilburn. In a letter to the poet Charles Brasch, dated 25 July 1947, she wrote: “The watercolour Portrait is more than a peak in my painting life, it is of a very intimate nature, the expression of my long and deep devotion to Gordon….”. ^[1]

[1] Letter to Charles Brasch, 25 July 1947, Hocken Collections, MS-996-3/222. Quoted in Jill Trevelyan, Rita Angus: An Artist’s Life, second edition (Wellington, 2021), p. 193.