PROVENANCE:

Estate of Evelyn & Frederick Page, Wellington. When Evelyn Page turned sixty-six Charles Brasch had written How meaningless years are when active and alert in mind. The painter had made her only application to the Queen Elizabeth 11 Arts Council for a travel grant and was given one hundred pounds. She was planning her final journey to Europe. She had particularly wanted to see a large Bonnard exhibition at Burlington House, but arrived only in time for its last day. 'Donnanl' she wrote, 'has done everything that I would have given almost anything to do.' Sadly, she also missed out on her prime purpose to experience the teaching of Oscar Kokoschka; he had retired to Switzerland and left others to take over his summer 'School of Seeing'. She arrived at the school, set up in the Castle Art Academy in Salzburg, also a little late. A huge class of young people from all over the world was already at work. She felt conspicuously white-headed. After a few days, the German professor who posed the model, glanced at her work and dismissively commented 'schmalz' - too sweet. She persisted with the unfamiliar, but requisite,medium of watercolour and found after a few days that the young crowded around to look at her work, and to talk. Of the school, she said, What I learned al Salzburg was l let the subject impress as simply as possible.

When it was over, Evelyn was too tired to join her family on a planned trip to Prague and Leningrad. She stayed instead to paint *Salzburg and then met Frederick for the Festival at Aix-en-Provence. Text: Evelyn Page Seven Decades, Janet Paul and Neil Roberts, Robert Allen & Unwin publishers 1986

*Salzburg 1967 was acquired by the late Janet Paul of Wellington who was a co-writer of Evelyn Page Seven Decades. The present larger work Salzburg returned to New Zealand with Evelyn and Frederick Page and hung in their own collection until Evelyn's death in 1988. It comes from the collection of the artist's family, Wellington.

Evelyn Margaret Polson was born in Christchurch on 23 April 1899. Eve, as she was known, early showed talent and formidable concentration when reading or painting, and enjoyed piano lessons. She was enrolled, aged 15, at the Canterbury College School of Art at a time when it was possible to combine the study of art with a general secondary education. Eve soon passed from elementary drawing and painting to advanced study in the life class taken by Richard Wallwork and in drawing from the antique with Leonard Booth. Cecil Kelly, who taught still life and landscape painting, may have been the strongest influence on her early work. She gained first-class awards in the School of Art examinations and special prizes for landscape painting.

In 1936 Evelyn Page travelled to Europe where she was very impressed by the French Post Impressionists and the portraits in the Tate Gallery, and she subsequently painted many portraits of often well known literary personalities. After her marriage to pianist Frederick Page in 1938, the artist went to live at Governor's Bay in Canterbury, and after a further trip to Europe in 1950, settled in Wellington where she commenced a series of cityscapes; subject matter not often depicted by artists of the era.

As her career developed, Page found affinities in the work of Austrian born Oscar Kokoshka and French impressionists - Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. In the period 1965-67 she joined the Kokoschka Summer School of Salzburg.

In 1986, two years before her death, the Robert McDougall Art Gallery curated and toured Evelyn Page: Seven Decades. The exhibition recognised a painter with an extraordinary zest and independence of spirit, whose lifetime's response to human character and very individual use of rich colour communicates her vivid reverence and joyful celebration of life.