PROVENANCE
Collection of the late Edith Campion

The Passengers, 1956 depicts two people travelling on a train or bus. There is a sense that this woman and man know one another. Their body language suggests a certain estrangement - her head fully turned, gazing out the window, his knitted brow and slumped shoulders.

Douglas has always been intrigued by the nuances of non-verbal communication, what he calls the human condition. As a painter, he perfected the art of closely observing without actually appearing to look, always ready with a sketchbook. He says: Years of curiosity have given my peripheral vision unusual powers. I can see a great deal out of the corners of my eyes and always have. People are fascinating. Yet I realise that if you stare, it's unpleasant and uncomfortable for them. Highly impolite, so I don't make this mistake but I manage to take in a great deal from one side or the other.

During the mid-1950s to 1960s, he painted French people going about their everyday lives. This was MacDiarmid rediscovering his adopted country and providing a fascinating figurative glimpse of the interplay between traditional and modern European culture. Apart from road trips to the Loire Valley, Provence and the French Riviera, Douglas lived in Paris in 1956. He was busy with commissioned portraits, regularly selling landscapes through a gallery in Montmartre.

These passengers were probably observed in August 1955, en route between France and Scotland. Having accepted the offer of a studio, Douglas set off for the Edinburgh International Festival with his great love, the composer, Douglas Lilburn. What is now a seven- hour fast train ride would have taken a couple of days - ample time to study his fellow passengers and make pages of notes and rapid sketches to develop later.

The Passengers could have been part of the catalogue of Douglas' one-man show at Andre Brooke's Gallery 91 in Christchurch in June/July 1959, or his 1961 Architectural Centre Gallery exhibition in Wellington, which MacDiarmid attended.

Anna Cahill Biographer - Colours of a Life: The Life and Times of Douglas MacDiarmid (2018)