The Artist’s Cottage, Clifton — Rita Angus

This short essay was originally published in the catalogue accompanying the 2021 exhibition Rita Angus: New Zealand Modernist at Te Papa Tongarewa.

The house in this painting, half-drafted in pencil and a preparatory layer of watercolour, was a generous gift from Rita Angus’s father: a place for her to live rent-free and paint. This work is anomalous in Angus’s painting of the 1940s – her buildings were usually subservient to the landscapes arcing around them. And though it remained unfinished, it is, perhaps, Angus’s acknowledgement of the significance of her father’s support.

When she sketched this work, Angus was a single, childless, middle-aged woman, working as a full-time painter. As such, her position in mid-twentieth-century New Zealand was also anomalous. She had few role models to emulate; no map for the life that she lived.

Feminist art historians have since argued that structural constraints rather than problems of innate ability prevent women from exercising their creativity: the lack of financial independence, prominent role models, quality education and freedom to access both public space and private spaces, such as studios. The tiny cottage depicted in this painting was on Aranoni Track in Clifton, in the hills above Sumner beach. The painter Douglas MacDiarmid described it in a letter to Angus’s biographer, Jill Trevelyan as a ‘minute, silent, shanty & garden on the Port Hills’, but the modest home freed Angus from some of the constraints that inhibit women; it gave her the financial and physical freedom to paint and think and be.

Although she enjoyed this freedom as a result of her father’s middle-class prosperity, Angus lived frugally. She relied on public transport, so when she exhibited with The Group or the Canterbury Society of Arts, she would simply carry her paintings down Aranoni Track and catch a tram into the central city. It is steep, the track, and she would have been breathless, arriving home after an exhibition’s closure, with a painting under her arm. Did she pause to lean her work against the strut of the pergola? Did she take a moment to enjoy the silence, alone again, and turn to look at the Pacific Ocean, its ‘lovely blue green greys’, lying to the north-west?[1]

[1] Letter from Rita Angus to Douglas Lilburn, 1 January 1951, ATL, MS-Papers-7623-071.