200 Years of New Zealand Painting by Gil Docking

Enlarged edition

With additions by Michael Dunn covering 1970 to 1990

"In 1769 Cook's ship Endeavour was off Tolaga Bay on the east coast of New Zealand's North Island. Here Sydney Parkinson, an English painter engaged by Joseph Banks to record botanical discoveries, made a pen-and-wash study of 'A Perforated Rock'. This is the starting point of Gil Docking's 200-year survey of New Zealand painting. Docking, Director of the Auckland City Art Gallery, divides his subject into four main periods:

• EXPLORATION: during which British and French painters of varying degrees of ability recorded what they saw during brief visits.
• SETTLEMENT: beginning with Augustus Earle and ending with J B C Hoyte, during which New Zealand's leading painters were, to a man, European-born and seeing the country as a new and unfamiliar land.
• TRANSITION: this period covers the 1870s to the 1920s, and the author opens it with W M Hodgkins, who arrived in Dunedin in 1860. This, the formative era of New Zealand painting, ends with a study of A W Walsh and includes the first generation of New Zealand painters to be born and brought up in the country.
• NEW IMPULSES: The fourth period begins with Lois White and takes the reader to 1969.

"Throughout, Mr Docking has selected the illustrations to complement his narrative, so that they are not merely an assemblage of period works but are integrated with his text. The result is an illustrated study of surpassing interest."

Large hardback, 1990, 248pages, good used condition, small wear and tear in dust jacket