Falling in love with romance

Mary Kisler fell in love with Frederick Goodall's The Finding of Moses (on wall) as a little girl. Photo / Natalie Slade

Mary Kisler first fell in love with Frederick Goodall's enormous The Finding of Moses when she was a little girl.

"My mother brought me in here to see it when I was 7," says the Auckland Art Gallery Mackelvie curator of international art. "I was always rather surprised my mother liked that one because of the nudity. It was the exoticism that she liked."

Today, Kisler is over the moon that the 1862 oil painting has found a home that befits its historic origins in an immaculately restored area the AAG had previously used for storage over the past 50 years.

The Mackelvie Gallery, dedicated to displaying the AAG's extensive collection of Victorian art, has had one mother of a makeover as part of the AAG's expansion and refurbishment. Originally called the East Gallery, two floors were added in the 1960s to provide storage for paintings at the top, with a prep workroom below. That has all been cleared out, with the floor slightly raised to allow wheelchair access along a gently sloping ramp along the adjacent corridor.

Pristine reproductions of the one remaining plaster roundel on the curved ceiling have been completed by South Auckland Plasterers, as well as ornate decorations at the top of the gallery's majestic pillars. The glass panels in the curved central ceiling have been cleaned up, and the walls are painted with Resene Coral Red, a hue "very similar to the one that was here originally, we found a fragment of it", says Kisler.

The space has reverted to its original name, the Mackelvie Gallery, to honour James Mackelvie, the Scottish collector who lived in Auckland from 1865-71. On his return to London, Mackelvie started sending works back to Auckland, with the gallery bearing his name added to the original AAG building in 1893.

When the gallery opens next Saturday, visitors will get the chance to see some works from the Victorian collection which have not been available for decades, such as two tall designs for stained glass windows by Edward Burne-Jones, gifted to the gallery in 1924.

Victorious, a large 1880 painting by James Dromgole Linton, subtitled "Illustrating the Life of a Soldier of Fortune" in the court of Henry VIII, "has never been out in my lifetime", says Kisler. "We have had that restored and reframed. I think this is a fancy dress painting. A lot of artists were looking at Shakespeare's interpretation of the Elizabethan period which was quite different to what it was really like in actual history."

Gallery conservation expert Sarah Hillary has also worked her magic on Edmund Blair Leighton's Un Gage d'Amour (1881), which had gone so dark barely any details could be seen. Now the vision of a knight about to go off to battle reaching for his helmet as his true love winds her scarf around it glows, a true Pre-Raphaelite ode to romantic love.

One of the most dramatic works in the room is also by Leighton, In Time of Peril (1897), showing a noblewoman, her child and a knight in a boat seeking refuge in a monastery. The child's eyes are full of terror as he (or she) turns to see if their pursuers are upon them.

"This was looking back to King Arthur and his court as a model for a better society, and partly a response to the industrial age, looking at Greece and Rome but also looking at English history," says Kisler. "The child's face is fantastic, the fear, but I also love the fact that the knight is pulling back her cloak to show the baby. But then you notice that she has also got all her worldly goods," she laughs.

At one end of the room, between the 2.3m-high stained glass drawing works, hangs Burne-Jones' massive pastel drawing The Car of Love, resplendent with a brand new replica frame - replacing the old borer-ridden one - created by Manawatu craftsman Detlef Klein.

"The painting from this work, which is the same size, hangs on the staircase in the library at the Victoria & Albert in London," explains Kisler. "But actually, it's not as good as this so this is the only idea of what his conception was. Edward Burne-Jones, who was married with children, had an affair with a very beautiful and exotic Greek artist in London called Maria Zambaco. It was doomed to failure. He thought of the 'car' as something that drew you on inexorably and you couldn't do anything about it."

Two works should be familiar to anyone who has visited the gallery over the years: For of Such is the Kingdom of Heaven (1891), by Frank Bramley, and John Everett Millais' heart-rending Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind (1892).

Bramley's painting, set in Lyme Regis, which depicts a child's funeral, is another work Kisler remembers well from her childhood expeditions with her mother.

"This was in the Royal Academy then [collector] Marcus Stone sent it to New Zealand for the Mackelvie Trust so it disappeared from sight in England," she explains. "There is a big Bramley painting in the Tate [A Hopeless Dawn] which they have always thought was the best Bramley that had been done - then they discovered recently that we had this.

"I think this work is astounding. We've had artists in here who want to look at the white on white. It is so humane. You have got the two classes of people - the middle-class ones with the sick-looking girl in the procession, then the fisherfolk who are quite poor but if you look at their ruddy cheeks, they are much healthier."

Blow Blow Thou Winter Wind represents "a moral dilemma", says Kisler. A dog stands in the middle of the bleak landscape howling its head off as its master walks away, abandoning his wife and baby, left slumping in the snow, the woman's bare foot peeking through a wrecked shoe. What will be their fate?

Kisler says the collection in the Mackelvie Gallery will change from time to time.

"We have got some really big paintings that we couldn't fit in so we can certainly change things about and do a completely different hanging. Selecting the works to hang here is the fun part, working out the kinds of conversations."

There is an added bonus. When the gallery opens at 11am next Saturday, the doors at the right-hand side end will also be flung open so visitors can traverse a walkway that leads to the Wellesley St wing. "So you can walk over the top of the south atrium to Upper Wellesley which you've never been able to do before."