33. John Holmwood 1910 - 1987
The Gardener
Oil on board
121 x 75 cm
Signed
est. $25,000 - 35,000
Fetched $19,000
Relative Size: The Gardener
Relative size

Provenance: Holmwood Family Collection

Illustrated: The Painted Garden in New Zealand Art Christopher Johnstone, Godwit/Random 2008 Art New Zealand - Issue 31, Winter 1984 Article titled: John Holmwood - Thirty Years of his Painting, Alexa M. Johnston

Holmwood was a painter of landscapes, urban scenes and subjects with figures, all very much of their time: brightly coloured, expressionist in handling and direct. The figure paintings especially were wittily observed and lively and, as a result, they were popular. The artist considered The Gardener to be one of his best works but said nothing more about it.

It is tempting to call it "New Zealand Gothic" because it seems to be an ironic version of the famous painting by the American regionalist painter Grant Wood, American Gothic of 1930 (Art Institute of Chicago) in which a middle-aged farmer couple, the man holding a pitchfork, stand in front of a weatherboard house.

Here Holmwood has a single figure holding a rake in his left hand and the handle of another implement in his right. Like Wood's man, Holmwood's is largely bald, but the hair on either side of his head sticks up and gives him a slightly devilish look. In place of the jacket that Wood's man wears, the gardener wears a jerkin of some kind. Behind the gardener is an orange tree in front of a red garden shed and red barn appears in the background of American Gothic.

The Gardener has all the characteristics of Holmwood at his idiosyncratic best; humorously observed, defined by firm outlines and painted with lively brushwork and vivid colours. One feels absolutely certain that The Gardener was someone that Holmwood knew.

Holmwood's first solo exhibition was in 1957, the year after he painted The Gardener, at the Architectural Centre Gallery in Wellington where he showed 26 paintings, mostly oils.

The reviewer thought Holmwood "a gifted artist, imaginative, sensitive and, in many ways, quite original in his approach". He concluded with the advice that Holmwood "has the skill to become a brilliant landscape painter.. but", he added, "there are times, especially in his figure studies - an example is "The Gardener" when he sacrifices quality for the bizarre."

Peter Tomory, recently appointed as director of the Auckland City Art Gallery included the painting in the first of his ground-breaking annual exhibitions Eight New Zealand Painters (No 14, November - December 1957).

Holmwood thought The Gardener one of his best works and he recorded that, in addition to his Landscape with a Sawmill (1952), it was in a Tomory-selected exhibition sent by the New Zealand government to tour the Soviet Union in 1959. The Gardener is not listed but a letter from Colin McCahon, then keeper of the gallery, states that "permission has been given for the John Holmwood picture to be included" and this may well have been The Gardener.

The Gardener was included in his Retrospective Exhibition 1946-1976 at the Auckland Society of Arts in 1984.

Quoted from' The Painted Garden in New Zealand Art' Godwit/Random House New Zealand, 2008 with kind permission of the author Christopher Johnstone and publisher.

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