Mountain stream, Otira Gorge

At Ōtira Gorge in the Southern Alps, Petrus van der Velden became obsessed with the mountain stream, painting it at least 11 times in two years.

He believed that studying nature could bring one into closer communication with God, and sought ‘solitary places that still bear the impress of the Almighty Hand’. Of the Ōtira paintings, scholar Rodney Wilson wrote:

<em>Nature is endowed with a spiritual intensity and man feels helpless before brooding skies and crashing waters. Otira knows sunlight, albeit infrequent, and Van der Velden permits us to know it at lighter moments; but the cycle is characterised almost exclusively by the one mood of melancholy.</em>