Mount Rolleston

It didn’t take long for Petrus van der Velden to find his muse in New Zealand’s dramatic landscape. In 1891, seven months after arriving from the Netherlands, he travelled to Ōtira Gorge in the Southern Alps. This turbulent setting compelled him to paint ‘from morning until evening every day in spite of the cold and wind’.

A series of works based on the brooding profile of Mount Rolleston emerged from his second visit, deep in the bitter winter of 1893. The thickly applied paint supports one critic’s observation that Van der Velden’s colour was ‘unerringly “fat” … in character, luminous too, and always placed where it ought to be with gradations of exquisite beauty’.