Landscape, Rotorua

Dr. John Campbell Duncan was a ‘balneologist’ (an expert in therapeutic bathing) and a competent landscape painter. In 1934, he won the Bledisloe Medal for Mamaku Valley. The New Zealand Herald noted, ‘The whole is carried out in the delicate grey-green tones characteristic of all Dr. Duncan’s work, which has been consistently influenced by that of his friend, Elioth Gruner, the well-known Australian landscape painter.’[1] Duncan and Gruner met in 1931, when the former visited Aotearoa. This work, painted that same year, is certainly in sympathy with pictures by Gruner.

Duncan was a friend of various other artists, perhaps most notably Wilfred Stanley Wallis.

[1] ‘Painter’s Success: The Bledisloe Medal: Award to Dr. Duncan’, New Zealand Herald, 27 April 1934, 12. https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH19340427.2.121.