EDITORIAL
On the 10th October we opened the exhibition ' Eight New Zealand Painters III' in the Wertheim Room.
This room, newly decorated, is the last on our list to be altered and painted. It has been a long time since renovations first began but
it has been worth the dislocation to our programme, for now our collections and exhibitions can be displayed in a truly sympathetic
atmosphere.
ASSOCIATES
Mr Eric McCormick's Inland Eye is now on
sale, price 3/-. The third Annual Art Lecture, on 10 November, 1959, will be given by Mr
Ernest Plishke the well known Wellington architect.
THE PERMANENT COLLECTION
Two paintings in the collection, Henri Hayden's Still Life with Bottle of
Bass (c. 1920) and Caspar Netscher's Girl with Flowers (1683) are to be published overseas. The first in a new book
on the history of Modern Art by Sir Herbert Read and the second in a monograph on Netscher by Dr Eduard Plietzsch of
Cologne.
MACKELVIE TRUST
We are pleased to announce that the Trust has acquired the two missing prints from Durer's SMALL
ENGRAVED PASSION, which acquisition
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was reported in Quarterly No. 10. An error occurred in describing one of the missing prints as B3. This
should read B5 CHRIST
TAKEN BY THE JEWS.
JOSEPH WRIGHT OF DERBY ARA (1734-1797)
British
PORTRAIT OF MRS BOYLE (See cover)
Oil 30 x 25 ins
The Mackelvie Trust, 1956
Wright was one of the more considerable of English provincial painters of the 18th Century. Besides being
an innovator of the industrial and scientific subject (Experiment with an Air Pump, Tate), he was also a prolific portrait painter
particularly of the gentry- of Derbyshire. He was a pupil of Hudson, the master of Reynolds, but the delicacy of the painting in
this portrait, is reminiscent of Allan Ramsay. There is evidence here too that the highlights came from lamp or candlelight which
Wright, a Romantic, used in his pictures to dramatise the subject.
Wright worked all his life in Derby except for a visit to Italy where he seemed more interested in volcanoes
and firework displays than in the conventional studies of a Grand Tour. His chief patrons were the local industrialists, such as
Arkwright, which partly explains his interest in scientific and industrial processes.
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