Sarjeant Happenings: Gifted artwork ‘more than just a painting on the wall’

Reverend Elizabeth Body with the Marcus King painting she has gifted to the Sarjeant Gallery.

The Sarjeant Gallery is the delighted recipient of an artwork donated by Whanganui resident Reverend Elizabeth Body.

Landscape (Orongorono Valley, Wainuiomata) is a large, oil on canvas painting by New Zealand artist Marcus King and has been a source of immense pleasure to Body and family for more than six decades.

“We used to tramp in the Orongorongos and take the kids there. [The painting is] of two trampers walking along the river, which is where we used to go. So the painting was, in a sense, very much part of my life, in more ways than just a painting on the wall,” Body said.

A few years ago she felt it was time to give the painting to the Sarjeant Gallery, where she knew it would be well cared for and seen by more people.

“I felt that it needed to be in a place where it was looked after. We’d had it for 60-odd years, and it was someone else’s turn. [I wanted it] to come to a place where people could look at it, where people could admire it, understand it and get pleasure from it like I did.”

Body inherited it from her father, who had been gifted the painting by business clients. In the 1950s, King’s work was not well-regarded because he painted from photographs, but the family loved it, she said.

“When it came [time] to get it, I went up to Auckland, bundled it in the back of the car in a very uncaring way and brought it back. It was damaged a little bit [because] my father smoked cigars and it had been in the sun.”

She hung the painting on a good-sized wall at home in Balgownie Ave and has enjoyed many a virtual tramp from the comfort of an armchair.

“It’s big enough to feel you can just walk into it.”

On her return from a recent visit to family in England, she discovered the book Marcus King: Painting New Zealand for the World, published in 2015 by Peter Alsop and Warren Feeney. Realising that his work was now much more appreciated than when her father hung the painting above the family mantelpiece, she thought King’s work really belonged to the New Zealand public and decided to gift the painting.

On advice from the Sarjeant Gallery, Body engaged the services of heritage conservateur Detlef Klein at Manawatū Museum Services Ltd (MMS) in Palmerston North. Susan-Marie Spoerl, a painting conservator on contract from Germany with MMS 2016-2017, completed treatment on the painting.

“I said to Detlef, ‘What do I need to do to look after it?’ And he said, ‘Well, you must draw the curtains because, you know, it’s faded a bit and needs an even temperature’. And I thought, ‘I can’t do that. I can’t look after it’.”

To help with the process of parting, she wrote a poem.

“I needed to acknowledge in myself that I had parted with something and it was a grief, but the season had finished. I don’t miss it and it’s given me pleasure to know that it’s cared for.”

Landscape (Orongorono Valley, Wainuiomata) is one of King’s very few known large paintings (frame 995 x 1310 x 35mm) and joins four other much smaller works by him in the Sarjeant collection.

Curator of collections Jennifer Taylor Moore notes a luminous quality to King’s paintings. She believes the book has raised awareness of the quality of his work and his contribution to New Zealand history.

“His works are all incredibly enjoyable to look at, I think, and they’re also of specific New Zealand places. I think the book has really helped in terms of how Marcus King is viewed. For a long time, he was kind of ignored because he did so much work in the commercial sector.”

King (1891-1985) was born in Manaia, Taranaki. He studied at Elam and, following service in World War I, moved to Wellington, where he worked in advertising. He taught at the Wellington Technical Institute and exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts. He later became an artist with the New Zealand Tourist and Publicity Department, producing many paintings and posters that promoted New Zealand.