Dutch touch a favoured work

Petrus van der Velden was a professional painter from Europe who settled in Aotearoa in the 1890s and inspired a new generation of New Zealand artists.

One of the Aigantighe Art Gallery’s well known favourite paintings is on display, Girl with Candle, c.1892. This was painted by van der Velden and is one of four of his artworks in the permanent collection. This particular oil painting was gifted by the South Canterbury Art Society when the gallery opened in 1956.

Van der Velden was born in Rotterdam in 1837. His Dutch origins and training are immediately apparent in this portrait of a young lady with a candle, which could be described as a genre painting. Seventeenth-century Dutch artists such as Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) and Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1906-1669) played a key role in developing the genre-style of painting which sought to depict everyday life and people with the same technical elegance as was used to represent biblical or mythical subjects. Both artists, along with van der Velden, used a technique called chiaroscuro – the use of exaggerated light – to create contrasts in their portraits.

The light source in Girl with Candle is of course the candle the young woman holds. A candle held at night produces an excellent chance to depict light with contrasting darkness and illuminate details that are magnified in the light source. All but the young woman’s hands, forearms, chest and face, that are touched by the candle’s light, fall into darkness, and van der Velden makes a point of the realistic details found in these areas that are caused by the light – such as the pink skin tone of her face, the flush in her checks, the heightened red blood tinge in her fingers, and the flickering yellow reflections of the flame on her white night gown.

Van der Velden retained an appreciation for accurate representation of his subject throughout his career, and upon immigrating to Christchurch in 1890, his imagination was also captured by the wild natural environments of Aotearoa. Much of his output focused on the landscape – most notably his depictions of the untamed Otira Gorge in Arthur’s Pass.