Boats, Island Bay

Trained in Ōtautahi in the later 1930s, Juliet Peter worked on the land in the Women’s Land Service during the Second World War, and afterwards was employed in the School Publications Branch of the Department of Education in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. It was here that she met her future husband, Roy Cowan. Together, they were among pioneer ceramists in Aotearoa.

The artist was a close friend of Rita Angus, with whom she did sketching of the Italian fishing boats at Island Bay at the time this painting was made. They also shared a concern for the way in which the old city of Wellington was disappearing and changing in the face of motorway development and suburban sprawl. This vigorously painted work in a carefully controlled range of colours exhibits the artist’s interest in structure, its composition dominated by the natural geometry of timbered dinghy hulls and crayfish pots.