Maungawhau Mount Eden, Tāmaki Makaurau

Robert Johnson was born in Tāmaki Makaurau and studied at the Elam School of Art from 1910 to 1914 under Edward Friström and Archibald Frank Nicoll. In 1920, an exhibition of his works and those of John Weeks and Francis McCracken toured galleries in New Zealand’s main cities. The following year Johnson moved to Australia, where he enjoyed a reputation as a landscape painter. In this work, although the environs of Maungawhau Mount Eden are already well populated, there is still farmland in the foreground.