A legend in New Zealand art circles, she established a foundation to finance artists’ scholarships, to be funded from the sale of art in her estate. Her work is represented in both New Zealand and overseas public and private collections.
New Zealand painter
Art critics and historians have identified Frances Hunt as an able practitioner of the conservative tradition of landscape painting, which was popular in Auckland in the 1920s and 1930s.
She painted mainly small, almost abstract landscapes, portraits and flower studies. Humble, unambitious and seemingly self-sufficent, she nevertheless had considerable influence on New Zealand painting.
Painter whose long and prodigious career left a huge and influential body of work, which is represented in all major public and many private collections in New Zealand.
English artist whose drawings are distinctive for their individual charm and quaint humor.
In her early 20s, Frances Simpson Stevens was the lone American at the center of the Futurist movement. Today, however, only one of her paintings has been preserved and few people know her name.
Often diminished to a footnote in the life of her husband, the painter Jules Pascin, Hermine David was an artist in her own right who gained recognition in the early twentieth century. She worked in a variety of media and styles, including watercolor, pastel, charcoal, drypoint, and lithography.
As an artist she was extremely self-critical, maintaining the highest standards of professionalism, but she was generous in her help to young artists. Although well regarded as a landscape painter, her major contribution to New Zealand art lies in the way she revitalised formal portraiture in the 1920s and 1930s.
The limitless decorative possibilities in Maud Sherwood’s work – vivid colours dashed onto the paper in broad sweeps, the assured linear qualities either loosely or tightly structured – reflected her own ‘vital and attractive’ personality.