ILLUSTRATED
Canterbury Society of Arts, 1933, cat no.296

Clearly dated 1933, this delightful watercolour was painted when Rita Angus (then using her married name Cook) was 25 years old and rapidly reaching maturity as an artist. She had completed five years of study at the Canterbury School of Art, was married to the painter Alfred H. Cook (though they would separate the following year) and was exhibiting widely. The six works she exhibited at the Canterbury Society of Arts in 1933 included (in addition to Seaside Baches), several watercolour landscapes, portraits of her husband Alfred Cook and her sister Jean Angus and her startlingly innovative oil painting Gas Works (now in Christchurch Art Gallery), a painting which undoubtedly ruffled some feathers among the staid audience of the CSA. It is interesting to note that Seaside Baches at 6 guineas was the highest priced of her six works, more than the oil Gas Works, suggesting that she placed a high value on it. Also that same year her contributions to the short lived New Zealand Society of Artists (which briefly subsumed and replaced The Group of which Angus was also a member) included her startlingly modernist portrait of her sister Edna, The Aviatrix. She was already in possession of her full repertoire as an artist.

In 1933 Rita was living in the Cook family home at Ferry Road in Christchurch, the road which leads towards the Estuary, the seaside suburb of Sumner and the steep bluff of Scarborough Hill on the far side of which is the small beach and bay of Taylors Mistake on Banks Peninsula, then as now lined with idiosyncratic seaside baches – the probable subject of this watercolour. The picturesque qualities of Taylors Mistake have appealedvto many painters beside Angus, including Margaret Stoddart, Rosa Sawtell, James Cook, William Reed, Colin McCahon, Bill Sutton and others.

In the meticulously rendered watercolour Angus’ focus is on the foreground foreshore with its lively surf and scattered beachwalkers, on the stone sea wall and the closely observed vernacular baches of the middle section and on the bleak, treeless wall of the steep hills behind the bay, dotted with occasional buildings. The presence of modest buildings somewhat awkwardly deposited in the landscape is a subject that always attracted Angus; it anticipates her most famous painting Cass (1936) and was a theme which continued to absorb her years later in her studies of sheds, churches and houses in Thorndon and Hawkes Bay.

The confidence and fidelity with which the scene is recorded suggests that the artist was confident of having found a subject close to her heart.

PETER SIMPSON

Canterbury Society of Arts, 1933, cat no.296

An Estate Collection, Auckland