Peter Simpson on Colin McCahon 'View from Mrs Neame’s Old House at Mahau'

Peter Simpson on Colin McCahon 'View from Mrs Neame’s Old House at Mahau'

Featured in Important Paintings & Contemporary Art | Tuesday 15 August 2023

Soon after the outbreak of World War II in 1939 the 20-year- old Colin McCahon and his Dunedin friend Rodney Kennedy left Pangatotara near Motueka where they had been working on a tobacco farm and moved to Mapua to live in the temporarily vacated home of Toss and Edith Woollaston. For economic reasons, the Woollastons had gone to live at Sherrington in Pelorus Sound near Havelock to look after an elderly woman and her property. They invited Colin and Rodney to join them for Christmas and New Year, which they did, living in an old house in Mahau Sound (part of Pelorus Sound) for December, January and part of February, 1939-40. Eventually the arrangement broke down and Woollaston returned to Nelson where he was later joined by Colin and Rodney at Mapua for the fruit-picking season. Edith, meanwhile, went to Dunedin to stay with her parents while her second child was born.

Colin wrote to his parents and his sister Beatrice while he was living at Mahau, describing the landscape, the sunsets, the old house they were occupying and activities such as boating, swimming and fishing (Colin even caught a huge sting-ray) and, of course, painting. To his parents he reported: ‘I have done a number of drawings & one or 2 paintings but nothing of any real value I think. Probably I do not know the country well enough & something will be done in a week or two that is better’. In a second letter (also undated) he wrote: ‘We have been painting along at Sherrington for a few days to keep Edith company as Toss has gone to Motueka to help finances somewhat by doing tobacco work. As yet nothing of great worth has been achieved in any painting but there are definite improvements as I become more used to the landscape’ (quoted with permission).

Of the three or four paintings known to have been done at Mahau the present work is one of the larger and more ambitious. It was one of two paintings given to Woollaston as a gift in exchange for his portrait Ivan and remained in his possession for over 50 years. Untitled by the artist, the present title, View from Mrs. Neame’s Old House at Mahau, was supplied by Woollaston. The view is away from the water of the Sound, past foreground sheds, fields and poplar trees in the mid-distance, towards steep-sided, bush- denuded hills typical of the Marlborough Sounds. Painted in oils on paper, the successive ridges (overlapping planes as influenced by Cézanne and by Woollaston himself) are heavily outlined in charcoal, with the most distant ridges and peak silhouetted against a pale sky. The painting is well- constructed and, like most of McCahon’s landscapes of the period, is fairly sombre and subdued in colour, light and dark ochres predominating, with grey and white in the sky and buildings. The effect – impressively mature for a 20-year-old – is deliberately not seductively ‘scenic’, the emphasis being placed on the anatomy of the landscape, and the structure of the painting itself.

Peter Simpson