EDITORIAL
With a sense of relief, after four years of reconstruction and renovation, we can say that this year will be entirely free of this
kind of activity. But in two or three years time the Gallery will again be in the hands of builders and carpenters for then the area now occupied by
the City Library will provide additional exhibition rooms which by then will be badly needed.
STAFF
Hamish Keith and Ross Fraser have now returned from Melbourne where they spent a month working in the National Gallery of
Victoria. We should like to thank Mr Westbrook and his staff for providing what seems to have been a most comprehensive programme.
ART GALLERIES & MUSEUMS ASSOC. OF N.Z.
The Director was elected President for the current year.
GALLERY ASSOCIATES
The Associates opened this year's activities with an excellent talk by Dr Ursula Hoff, Keeper of Prints & Drawings at Melbourne, on the
Gallery's permanent collection of prints. A film show and a formal debate on New Zealand painting have followed. Attendances have been good, but it would be
encouraging to see more members supporting these events.
The speaker at this year's Annual Art Lecture will be T. M. Woollaston, the artist. He is represented by several works in the collection,'the earliest being dated 1957.
He is fifty this year and therefore can look back over the
|
|
most progressive period in New Zealand painting.
LUNCH TIME LECTURES
The recently instituted series of talks on Wednesdays have been well attended and it is gratifying to know that through them, the permanent
collection particularly, will become better known to the public.
THOMAS BARKER OF BATH (1769-1847), British
WOOD GATHERERS
Oil on canvas 40 x 51 ins Presented by Dr Hugh Wansey Bayly, 1940 Thomas Barker is the best known of the ' Barkers of Bath'
apparently being the most prolific and assiduous painter amongst this large family of painters. He was a painter of great but unequal powers, his works
alternating between near greatness and merely commonplace. His subjects were equally various, landscapes, complicated genre, some portraits,
and numerous paintings of ' woodmen.'
These ' woodmen' and other of his rustic groups became very popular and were reproduced on pottery and textiles.
Barker exhibited extensively with the Royal Academy, the British Institution, the Royal Society of British Artists and in 1813 published his Rustic Figures after Nature. Our
painting falls between the two extremes of Barker's work being neither one of his masterpieces nor on the other hand commonplace. That it has been painted with perhaps more
impatience than real care is unfortunately apparent in some parts of this work but this deficiency is largely compensated for by the fresh and vigorous handling of the trees.
C.McC.
|
