Evelyn Page 'Nude with Fruit'

Nineteenth century French painters delighted combining naked women with fruit: Manet positions the ample buttocks of his picnicking nude in Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) adjacent to a fruit basket which is tipped up towards the viewer to display ripe peaches and plums. Gauguin’s young woman in Woman Holding a Fruit. Where Are You Going? (1893) holds a large mango to her bare bosom. But few women artists have relished painted the female nude as a voluptuary in the way that Evelyn Page did.

Uniquely in New Zealand art history, she began her exploration of the subject of the naked female form while she was just 22 years old, startling visitors to the New Zealand Academy of Arts by exhibiting a nude A Summer’s Day in 1921. The model for Summer Morn (1929), painted while the artist was on holiday with friends on the Karamea River on the West Coast, famously petitioned the artist to have it removed from display at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery in 1940. As Page recalled, the model wrote to tell her that “to my horror I saw my own backside on the walls!” She asked if Page could have it removed: “I just can’t live with the thought that the public can see me whenever they like.

In Nude with Fruit (1961–62) Page chooses to intervene in the long history of the reclining nude as a subject, gesturing to the Italian Renaissance paintings of Giorgione and Titian. This is one of ten important nudes which the artist completed between 1957 and 1985. Always the figures are positioned in bright daylight, in a window or doorway. She enjoyed depicting somnolent figures in repose, either fully or partially displaying their bodies as if they have cast off their clothes in summer heat.

Her images are loosely painted, lush and sensuous, particularly compared to the sharply observed nude self-portraits of her contemporaries Rita Angus (1908–1970) and Lois White (1903–1984). The floral-patterned indigo fabric behind the subject here, and the amorphous fabric that piles up at her back and knees shows her admiration for Matisse and his ability to use textiles to contrast with human flesh. French Post-Impressionism was a strong influence on her work.

Christchurch-born but Wellington-based Evelyn Page (née Polson) was an artistic prodigy. Aged just 16 she joined the painting classes at the School of Art Canterbury College, winning a medal of painting and completing her Diploma of Fine Arts in 1921, returning in 1930 to teach at the school for six years. She joined with other avant-garde Christchurch artists to form The Group in 1927, as a reaction to the conservatism of the Canterbury Society of Arts and because she was an enthusiast for modernism.

Once her husband Fred Page was appointed to the School of Music at Victoria University in 1946, Evelyn and the family took up residence in a double-story Edwardian villa at 20 Hobson Street, Thorndon, where she hired models to pose for her in the dining room, where this work was painted over the summer of 1961–62. Fred Page’s sabbatical enabled her to tour art galleries in Britain and Europe in 1950 which brought her up to speed with post-war developments in European art. Here she enlivens the surface with directional brushwork, allowing plenty of the white canvas beneath to shine through, lightening the palette and giving the appearance of bright indirect light falling on the figure from some unseen source.