Provenance: Artist's Family Collection

In 1960 Peter Siddell married Sylvia, the couple lived in Auckland where their two daughters were born. From 1972 Siddell painted professionally, holding his rst solo exhibition that same year. Peter Siddell's realist paintings are identi ed mainly with depictions of the environs of Auckland. While his works appear to be of actual places, his paintings have a subjective component, and might be better described as magic realism rather than truly realistic. The cityscapes and townscapes in Siddell's paintings are rendered empty, with the suggestion of events occurring outside the picture area. In this sense, his work can be compared to the metaphysical works of Giorgio de Chirico. Siddell is the second only New Zealand artist to be knighted: the rst was Sir Toss Woollaston. When Sylvia Siddell began her career in the 1970s, her art was shaped by the domestic and familiar. She incorporated family life into the process of art- making as a means of balancing her roles as wife and mother with her activity as an artist. Among other women artists of her generation, Siddell elevated the banal and ordinary occurrences of domestic life to an appropriate and challenging subject for art. Her comments on domesticity contained references to her feelings and frustrations about the wider world continued to inform her work three decades on.