to be oneself: Raymond McIntyre

'One's only chance is to be oneself.'
Raymond McInytre, Letter to his father, 3 June 1910

In 1984, I had been working alongside my parents at John Leech Gallery for nearly two years. My father was introducing me to New Zealand art history through books, exhibitions and regular visits to Auckland Art Gallery. It was there, during the Gallery's retrospective exhibition of Raymond McIntyre, that I first encountered his work. I was completely captivated.

Among the many memorable paintings in that exhibition, one stood out above all others: a remarkable self-portrait. It possessed an intensity and confidence that stayed with me long after I had left the gallery. I could never have imagined that more than forty years later I would have the privilege of exhibiting and offering that very painting for sale.

When it arrived recently, accompanied by two magnificent portraits of women, Yvonne and The Countess of Bessborough, an atmospheric landscape, and the delicate watercolour View from a Chelsea Attic, I felt the same excitement I had experienced as a young dealer in 1984.

The self-portrait, painted around 1920, had unfortunately been hidden within an unsympathetic 1970s frame. As I carefully removed it, the painting seemed to come back to life. On the reverse was an unexpected discovery: the original exhibition label from the 1984 Auckland Art Gallery retrospective. It was a wonderful reminder of where my own relationship with McIntyre had begun. Looking again into the artist's unwavering gaze, I was struck by how fresh and compelling the painting remains today.

The five works that form the heart of this exhibition have come from descendants of Raymond McIntyre in the United Kingdom. I first visited the family in the mid-1990s and again in 2016. Over the years we remained in contact, and more recently our conversations led to their decision to release this small group of paintings from the family collection. It is deeply rewarding to see these works return to New Zealand, where they can once again be appreciated by audiences who understand their importance.

Throughout my career, I have been fortunate to handle a number of significant works by McIntyre. Most recently, Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū acquired Street in Saint-Valery-sur-Somme (c.1913) through Gow Langsford Gallery. Many years earlier I sold a beautiful portrait to the collector Greg Moyle, whose recent gift of twenty important paintings to Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki has ensured that work will now be enjoyed by the wider public. In the 1990s we also placed an early self-portrait into The Fletcher Trust Collection, alongside several other important works that have found homes in major private collections throughout New Zealand. Looking back, I realise how privileged I have been to play a small part in preserving and sharing McIntyre's legacy.

Whether painting the brooding landscapes of Canterbury or the genteel women who became synonymous with his mature work, McIntyre brought an unmistakable sensitivity and sophistication to everything he produced. His paintings possess a quiet confidence that feels remarkably modern, even today.

More than forty years after first discovering Raymond McIntyre's work, I continue to regard him as one of New Zealand's finest and most individual painters. To be entrusted with these exceptional works by his family, and to present them to a New Zealand audience, is both an honour and a privilege.

I hope visitors find as much enjoyment in these paintings as I have throughout my career. They stand as a testament to an artist who remained true to his own vision and whose work continues to reward every close encounter.

John Gow, June 2026

'I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use-silence, exile, and cunning.'
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; repr., New York: Penguin, 1993), p268

Few artists occupy a more enigmatic place within New Zealand art history than Raymond McIntyre (1879-1933). A painter of subtle perception and refined sensibility, McIntyre belonged to a generation of artists who looked beyond the geographical and cultural horizons of a colonial outpost towards the cultural ferment of modern Europe. His career was shaped by a profoundly modernist impulse: the desire to fashion oneself anew through art. Like James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, McIntyre sought freedom through 'silence, exile, and cunning,' and as a young man, he left Ōtautahi Christchurch for London in 1909. There, amidst the restless energies of the modern metropolis, he cultivated a painterly sensitivity to atmosphere, shifting light, and the fugitive moods of modern life. The resulting body of work was remarkable for its elegance and inwardness, finding poetry in transient moments and turning ordinary experience into something intimate, luminous, and enduring.

Yet the foundations of this sensibility had been laid much earlier amidst the windswept dunes and tussock country of Wainoni, where McIntyre spent his youth. At a time when many New Zealand painters gravitated towards the sublime grandeur of the Southern Alps and Otira Gorge, McIntyre was drawn instead to quieter subjects. Favouring the fading light of dusk and the transformations of landscape at twilight, he developed an acute responsiveness to atmosphere that would remain a defining feature of his art. Executed with expressive palette-knife strokes and an unusual freedom of handling, these paintings were strikingly progressive within turn-of-the-century Christchurch. Such experimentation was met with little enthusiasm and, in a climate of conservatism, indifference or outright hostility. McIntyre left New Zealand at the age of thirty, never to return to his homeland.

London provided the conditions in which McIntyre's artistic vision could fully unfold. Studying under the preeminent painters William Nicholson and Walter Sickert whilst immersing himself in the city's galleries, theatres and concert halls, he absorbed the artistic currents of modern Europe without ever becoming beholden to them. Writing to his father in 1910, he remarked 'Who are eminent men, anyway? A man who looks big from New Zealand ain't so very big in London...One's only chance is to be oneself.'  Few statements better encapsulate the philosophy that guided McIntyre's career. Although he admired artists such as James McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert and William Nicholson, he refused simply to follow their example, instead forging an artistic language that was undeniably his own. London's art world was fiercely competitive, yet through persistence he secured representation with the prestigious Goupil Gallery during the 1920s. His finest works reveal an artist for whom style was never an end in itself, but the means through which a deeply personal way of seeing could be made visible. The assurance and sophistication evident in Self-Portrait (1920) reflects the confidence of an artist who had ceased to seek approval, instead committing himself to the pursuit of a singular vision.

This philosophy permeated every aspect of McIntyre's practice. Whether depicting coiffed women imbued with a quiet introspection, a solitary vase of asters, or the rhythms of life unfolding in a London park, he approached each subject with the same sensitivity and restraint. Through carefully modulated colour, elegant design and a remarkable economy of means, he transmuted the familiar into something contemplative and lasting, distilling the visible world into what he described as 'a sort of shorthand in which nothing is lost of character and movement.'

Despite exhibiting regularly in London and achieving a measure of professional success, McIntyre never attained the recognition afforded to many of his contemporaries. Following his 1918 exhibition at the Eldar Gallery, his public profile gradually declined, and by the late 1920s he had largely withdrawn from exhibiting altogether. Yet the modest manner in which his career unfolded perhaps mirrors the character of the work itself: self-contained, understated, and resistant to spectacle.

When McIntyre died in London at the age of fifty-four, the full measure of his achievement had yet to be recognised. Only in the decades that followed did his work assume its rightful place within the canon of New Zealand art history. Among the defining moments in McIntyre's posthumous reception was the 1984 retrospective exhibition at Auckland City Art Gallery, curated by Roger Blackley (1953-2019), which continues to inform the study and exhibition of his work. Today, McIntyre is recognised as one of Aotearoa's foremost modernists. Nourished by the artistic currents of Britain and France yet beholden to neither, he forged a visual language of remarkable subtlety, transforming colour into atmosphere and observation into feeling. His achievement lies not in grand declarations or radical manifestos, but in the steadfast pursuit of a vision that was unmistakably his own.

Anastasia Falkov, July 2026