GULLY, John;
Mitre Peak
1875
Watercolour on paper
590 x 500mm
This soaring peak was the 19th-century New Zealand artist’s favourite sublime subject. The public had an endless appetite for such paintings; they gave aesthetic form to the notion that even here in a far flung outpost of Empire the European taste for the picturesque sublime could be locally satisfied. Mountains shrouded in pinkish mist expressed the transcendental yearnings of 19th-century nature romanticism.