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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen-Webb's
• Sale Name:
  Important Paintings & Contemporary Art
• Sale Date:
  29 Nov 2017 ~ 6.30pm (New Zealand Daylight Time)
• Lot #:
  54
• Lot Description:
  Toss Woollaston
  Mapua
  oil on hardboard
  1210mm x 2750mm
  signed WOOLLASTON lower right in brushpoint, inscribed MAPUA 71/32 verso, original Woollaston 1933-1972 Manuwatu Art Gallery exhibition label affixed verso
• Provenance:
  Formerly in the Ron Sang Collection.
• Notes:
  ESSAY: In the summer of 1971, Toss Woollaston began a suite of large, panoramic landscapes, which represent a high point in his long career. Mapua is an outstanding example and was also the first in the series, developed in the studio from numerous drawings and watercolours made on location. It was exhibited at the Peter McLeavey Gallery in September that year and McLeavey, always quick to spot a chance for publicity, arranged a photograph of himself and Don Binney carrying it across an intersection. “We were taking it to show an interested party,” he told a reporter.(1) The exhibition – three large panoramic Nelson landscapes – attracted a rave review in the National Business Review. “It would be worthwhile to fly from anywhere,” Peter Cape declared, “to buy one of these oils for the boardroom or the entrance foyer.”2 The works sold quickly and Mapua entered the collection of one of McLeavey’s friends and key clients. While it signals a new departure in Woollaston’s work, Mapua also looks back to his early years in Nelson. As a young artist working as an agricultural labourer in Māpua in the 1930s, he painted this subject repeatedly – the view from his cottage, looking across Tasman Bay towards Mt Horoirangi. In 1971, only recently returned to Nelson after 18 years in Greymouth, it was natural for him to return to this landscape for a huge challenge – his first painting on a nearly three-metre-wide sheet of hardboard. The idea for the new size came from McLeavey and Woollaston – whose largest paintings to date were just over a metre in width – initially had doubts. “What is he trying to do to me?” he wrote to a friend. “Make me conform to modern standard sizes? Release my potential? Anyway, it might be an interesting experiment.”(3) McLeavey’s “interesting experiment” was a great success, allowing Woollaston to give full rein to his intuitive, exuberant brushwork within the parameters of a demanding pictorial format. A fluent, rhythmic image, imbued with sunlight and warmth, Mapua powerfully evokes the grandeur and vitality in nature and the artist’s deep attachment to this particular landscape. Jill Trevelyan 1. The Dominion, 23 September 1971. 2. Peter Cape, ‘Art gallery round-up’, NBR, 23 September 1971, p. 11. 3. Letter to Faye Hill, 28 January 1971, Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Group-1225.
• Estimate:
  NZ$150,000 - 200,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.