In 1979, Toss
Woollaston gifted 101 works on paper to The Suter Art Gallery collection. His
motivation for making this donation is best expressed in a letter dated 19 May 1979:
“My reasons for wishing
to make so large a gift to your gallery includes the following:
- My love
for Nelson, which I would like to celebrate in this way
- The
splendid new gallery you are about to have, where the works would be assured of better care and
presentation than I could give them as a private citizen
- The
climate of appreciation that is being engendered in Nelson by your
Director
I would like the Suter Gallery to be
the public gallery where the largest collection of my work was to be seen”.
The ‘Director’ was Austin Davies
(left), appointed in 1976 as The Suter’s first professional Director. Woollaston had been
involved with The Suter Art Gallery and Nelson Suter Art Society since the 1930s and obviously was
impressed by Davies and the gallery redevelopment he initiated in this period.
Woollaston hoped that the gift would “help commemorate what [Davies] has done and is doing in
Nelson without the stimulus and excitement of which I doubt it would have occurred to me to offer
this gift.” Davies was invited to make the selection of works from the artist’s
personal collection and it was the artist’s wish that the donation be referred to as “The Austin
Davies Hundred-and-one Woollaston’s”
The entire collection was first displayed in temporary mounts in 1980. Half of the
drawings were later properly framed and these toured throughout the country in 1985 in an
exhibition curated by Errol Shaw. Subsequently, The Suter continued to frame the
remainder whenever possible. Towards the end of 2007, a public appeal resulted in
sufficient donations to enable this 29 year project to be completed
To celebrate, Woollaston 101
presents the entire collection, suitably framed, for the first time. It is a comprehensive
representation of the artist’s mind at work and is distinguished by its focus on portraiture and
figure studies, a lesser known but important part of this artist’s development. It
also includes watercolour landscapes that were painted in the field and formed the basis of his
large studio oils for which the artist was perhaps best known. As a whole, the
exhibition reflects Woollaston’s belief that:
“Drawing is always intended as a
thing in itself, it might sometimes later serve as a reference for a painting but only
incidentally”.
We would like to take this
opportunity to express our gratitude to all those donors who contributed to the framing project and
without whom this exhibition would not have been possible.
Anna-Marie White
Curator