PROVENANCE Private Collection, Auckland Purchased from John Leech Gallery, November 1964

ILLUSTRATED Plate 3, Peter McIntyre's New Zealand A H & A W Reed, 1964

t was a Sunday afternoon when I came on this scene. In mood it was a right and proper time to paint it but the boys bathing in the foreground seemed strangely out of time - like a sports jacket glimpsed in a film of the Crimean War. The house on the right is the oldest wooden building in New Zealand, built in 1819 by James Kemp. Each evening the light is still lit in the window of the Kemp house, just as it was in the early days to guide boats to an anchorage in the inlet. The store on the left was built in 1833. To us this place is very very old, but a hundred or a hundred and fifty years here in New Zealand are as a thousand years in Europe or the East.

Peter McIntyre