Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Paint

A.H & A. W. Reed [Published date: 1980].[From front jacket flap] IN 1769 Cook's Endeavour was off Tolaga Bay on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island.Here Sydney Parkinson, an English painter engaged by Banks to record botanical discoveries, made a pen-and-wash study of A Perforated Rock.This work is the starting-point of Gil Docking's zoo-year survey of New Zealand painting, which concludes with Brent Wong's Abandoned Settlement (1969), a title that is itself a silent commentary on the two centuries that separate it from Parkinson's sketch.Gil Docking, Director of the Auckland City Art Gallery, divides his subject into four main periods beginning with that of Exploration, during which British and French painters of varying degrees of ability recorded what they saw during brief visits.The Settlement period follows, beginning withAugustus Earle (1793-1838) and ending with J.B. C. Hoyte (1835-1913), during which NewZealand's leading painters were, to a man, European-born and seeing the country as a new and quite unfamiliar land.The period of Transition covers the 1870s to the 1920s, and the author opens it with W. M.Hodgkins (1855-98), who arrived in Dunedin from England via Australia in 1860. This, the formative era of New Zealand painting, ends with a study of A. W. Walsh (1859-1916), and includes the first generation of New Zealand painters to be born and brought up in the country. The fourth period is described under the head of "New Impulses"; it begins with Lots White (b. 1903) and takes the reader up to 1969. Throughout, Mr Docking has selected the illustrations to complement his narrative, so that they are not merely an assemblage of period works but are integrated with his text. The result is an illustrated study of surpassing interest, not only to students of New Zealand's art history and to those who appreciate fine painting, but also to those who see a nation's development in the arts as of particular importance to its whole social fabric.