Colonial art woos with the wows

New Zealand has used its landscape's wow factor as a marketing tool since European colonists first painted its image on canvas.

So says art historian Jane Vial, who will outline in a public talk how early Europeans used oils and watercolours to express the awe they felt for the New Zealand landscape.

Scenic Wonderland will be held at the Yealands Estate Marlborough Gallery, High St, Blenheim, on Tuesday, October 25, the first of four lectures by Ms Vial in the following five weeks.

Characters like New Zealand Company surveyor and four-time New Zealand premier William Fox and premier Frederick Weld, who owned Flaxbourne Station, are two of the romantic landscape artists she will talk about.

Another is Thomas Attwood, whose early 1900s oil painting, Smith Sound, hangs in the Marlborough District Council staff room. Set in Fiordland, it shows majestic mountains towering above a tranquil bay. It typifies the early landscape paintings depicting the grand scenery of locations such as Fiordland, the Marlborough Sounds, Kaikoura and Rotorua.

"The Government wanted to promote New Zealand for its natural wonders," Ms Vial says.

New Zealand was one of the first countries in the world to have a tourism department. Established in 1901, it sold landscape paintings and printed promotional pamphlets to attract visitors and new citizens to the island country at bottom of the world.

The November 1 lecture, Getting Away From It All, looks at the next era of art in New Zealand, impressionism.

It became popular in the 1920s, when painted reproductions of mountains and fjords were out of fashion, Ms Vial says. The "wow" factor hadn't been entirely lost but impressionist artists wanted a more honest image.

Teacher and artist Charles Blomfield went on expeditions to Pelorus Sound and along the West Coast and used a pa at Mangamaunu on the Kaikoura coast as one of his bases.

The third lecture, on November 8, is Frances Hodgkins: A Well-Travelled Kiwi Artist. Hodgkins was born in Dunedin in 1869 and left New Zealand about 1901, meeting impressionist artists in the Netherlands, England and Australia.

After returning to New Zealand to see her mother, she was offered a job in England as an art buyer for New Zealand's national collection.

The final lecture, on November 22, suggests New Zealand's drink-driving problems are old ones. In The Awatere Accident, Vial looks at nine works by impressionist painter Mabel Hill, who was in the Awatere Valley when a horse-driven cart went into the river.

A 19th-century "boy racer" was the likely cause, says Ms Vial, who found Hill's paintings of the incident, and traced stories told by the young man's family members, diary entries, letters and reports in the local newspaper.