NZ Colonial Oil on Board, signed by Henry Garratt, (De Ritz), 1875 - 1953, an Auckland based landscape painter.
Showing a Maori Whare on a Lake Shore.
Height 330mm
Width 720mm
This oil painting does has some heavy craquelure when closely viewed but is still a very handsome and decorative early New Zealand painting.
The myth of de Ritz, was that of an itinerant late-nineteenth century painter (a view echoed in Una Platts’ 1980 Nineteenth Century New Zealand artists: a guide & handbook). "Seeing the paintings, one imagined a Romantic wanderer at makeshift easel, smoke rising lazily from a fire whereupon a billy boiled, a river before, a tent beyond: a remittance man, perhaps, a shamed scion escaping old Europe for Antipodean bush, fleeing heartache or financial scandal or the outcome of a duel"