Fine Art Auction Part I Saturday, 14 November 2026 / 11:00 am start

Rita Angus - ‘At Earls Court’, Watercolour, 1958

Lot Details

Rita Angus (1908 - 1970) At Earls Court (1958) Watercolour Signed & dated '58 lower right 370 x 310mm Provenance: Private collection, Christchurch Condition: Very good Lauded, along with Toss Woollaston and Colin McCahon, as one of the leading figures of twentieth-century New Zealand art. Perhaps best known for her portraiture, she sought to convey the “content of the sitter’s interesting complexity and diversity of moods”, producing works with a near-religious intensity experienced in the unforgiving, cold, harsh light of day – sharp, hard, flat. Her work was informed by extensive, exacting formal training beginning at Palmerston North Technical School, where students were required to accurately render every feather of a stuffed bird before progressing to painting the bloom on grapes. At Canterbury College School of Fine Art she received expert training from Cecil Kelly, Archibald Nicoll and Leonard Booth in life drawing, still life and landscape painting, supplemented by art history lectures which ignited a lifelong passion for Renaissance and mediaeval art. Angus’s work was also informed by a love of mathematics and the orderly qualities inherent in nature – Vermeer and Cézanne were favourites – and Byzantine art also attracted her. In 1958 she was granted a travelling scholarship; she journeyed to England. Earl’s Court, the view from a flat, exhibits all Angus’s hallmarks – acute observation and accurate drawing combined with a clear-cut sense of design, a simplified palette and a rhythmic compositional order. Her fascination with the underlying pattern of windows, walls and chimney stacks so typical of London terrace housing is keenly felt. Angus returned much later to the cityscape as subject, appalled at the new Wellington motorway extension that so violently bisected the city, destroying neighbourhoods in Kelburn and Thorndon and desecrating the peaceful oasis of the Bolton Street Cemetery. Hers was a distinct, highly personal art. “As a woman painter I work to represent love of humanity and faith in mankind in a world which is to me richly variable and beautiful.” Despite wanting to “write her own art history”, she is recognised as one of the outstanding artists of her generation and a pioneer of Modern Painting in New Zealand.