PROVENANCE
Collection of the late Dr Richard (Dick) Bomford, UK Purchased from Alex Reid & Lefevre (The Lefevre Galleries), King Street, London 1942

ILLUSTRATED
plate 10, Paintings by Felix Kelly, Introduction by Herbert Read

Felix Kelly left New Zealand in 1935 aged 21. He never returned. It was not so easy to take New Zealand out of Kelly however. Although he established a reputation in the UK and USA as a Neo-Romantic painter of grand houses in the landscape for rich clients, Kelly continued to produce the occasional, increasingly strange recollection of his home country. Takapuna Tramway was painted seven years after his departure from New Zealand. It reflects his life-long infatuation with motorised transport. Trains, trams, paddle steamers, abandoned traction engines, were regulars in his work. Though he grew up in Remuera, as a boy Kelly made frequent trips by ferry to the North Shore to visit friends, the Suter sisters, at their holiday home at Milford Beach. He knew the Takapuna tramway well. As late as the 1960s he wrote to the Takapuna Council, requesting pictures and details of old North Shore locomotives and of the Mon Desir Hotel. In this painting, the energetic vehicle clatters its way to the Milford terminus observed by a pair of nuns in an adjacent graveyard. Leafless trees gesticulate against a sombre sky. Even the church on the hill looks on aghast, partly because it has been transported from some English county to an alien setting of overhead power-lines and factory chimneys. Most of it is nothing like the Takapuna of Kelly's childhood.

DON BASSETT