This timeless Italian scene was one of Douglas’ favourite landscapes from first sight in 1948. He (and his sketchbook) revisited in 1991,1993 and 1996 and painted it many times, each work with a different mood and aspect.
Via Appia Antica is the famous Appian Way, the ancient cobbled Roman road that was the strategic military highway of the Roman empire - extending 44 miles/643 kilometres from the capital through the countryside to the Adriatic Sea. To Douglas, the road symbolised the continuity of classical past and present.
In the show catalogue of the 1995 ‘Haunted Landscapes’ exhibition, he said: “The Via Appia is the celebrated Roman road begun in the fourth century B.C. running south-east to Brindisi. Military might marched down it, and up returned currents of civilisation vital to Rome’s making and, it follows, ours.
“The Via Appia Antica still leads out over the Roman countryside merging uneasy jolting silences from the past into motor stinks and contemporary urban sprawl.”
Technically, Douglas saw this evocative landscape as “the basic themes of a painting, in other words horizontals cut by verticals. In paintings of Via Apia Antica, a favourite recurring location, for example, you’ve got the horizontal road, cut by pines and cypresses. I loved that whole ambience and, from sketches that I made there, I made I think 26 variations at one point. And exhibited them all.”
In 1992, French art historian Dr Nellie Finet wrote the catalogue introduction for MacDiarmid’s annual home exhibition of recent figurative and landscape works, including paintings of the Appian Way, for which his Paris studio, lounge and hallway were transformed into an open gallery for a few days.
"As a child he discovered the ancient world in the works and stories of his father was a refuge and a food that excited his imagination. Hardly adult, but sure of his vocation as a painter, he left the isolation of his native land, attracted by the Mediterranean world, which he explored for a few years and then settled permanently in Paris," she wrote.
"APPIAN WAY (Via Appia Antica) The Roman countryside is cut by this timeless procession through felicity and mystery, whose deeper shadows evoke as much the ‘dark wood’ of Dante as the heavy conscience of man.
This series provides further variations on [one of] MacDiarmid’s main themes: nature. …Although a confirmed figurative painter, his landscapes are alive with poetic abstractions... His use of acrylic allows for tonal modulations and movements of colour contributing positively to the balance of the whole. This alliance of technique and subject matter produces a vital expression of natural forces."
This painting came to New Zealand by default, when Douglas had to hastily despatch a full replacement exhibition of paintings to his homeland at short notice in 1995 – after the scheduled solo exhibition inspired by a ceremonial Māori canoe journey down the Whanganui River was relocated to the Sarjeant Gallery for the 1996 Whanganui River Festival. Douglas rose to the challenge with 12 landscape paintings from his ‘Via Appia Antica’ and ’Delphi’ series to a sudden gap in Christopher Moore Gallery’s exhibition timetable. Regrettably, these European scenes weren’t what Wellington art collectors were looking for at the time, and the paintings were later transferred to Ferner Galleries’ sale catalogue in March 1996.
Anna Cahill

International Art Centre, 6 August 2014