A Classical Interlude

During my most recent visit to the Auckland Art Gallery - Toi O Tamaki - I kept to the older chambers and corridors and found delight in what we once relegated to the shame bin of Victoriana and Neoclassical. I think my approach has a touch of the Surreal, fueled by the current exhibition Degas to Dali from the national galleries of Scotland.

A hint of De Chirico surely in this frozen moment on the wall of the old wing of the gallery.

Pallas Athena was a powerful Aries woman. I assume this from the sheep on her helmet.

While her artistic colleague Apollo would have been comfortable at an Oscar Wilde Soiree.

James Pyne's Genoa from the New Terrace 1862 might well be the poor man's Canaletto 

but I loved the detail, including the mini naval disaster

and the self referential glimpse of the artist at work in the corner.

Married by Walter Sadler 1896 is a lesson in body language that reveals the pathetic incompatability of a couple who should have stayed with their hobbies of reading and rose gardening instead of risking their happiness in what I suspect was an arranged marriage.

This Victorian bronze captures a very real and undernourished nineteenth 
century London street urchin not an Hellenic faun of the fourth century bc. 

This Romatic image of Milford Sound in the South Island was painted by John Perrett in 1895.

I found this 1847 Victorian lithograph by Stephen Ponsonby Peacocke online. It is of Sispara Peak in Kerala - a landmark on an important pass to the British Hillstation of Ootacamund. A copy of the print is nicely framed in our sitting room at 31A SISPARA PLACE, Beach Haven.