Story: Perceptions of the landscape

Toss Woollaston was one of the 20th-century painters who introduced modernist art to New Zealand. Although he painted portraits and figure studies, his major subjects were the hills and skies of Nelson, the West Coast and Taranaki. Like his friend, the artist Colin McCahon, he went beyond a realistic approach to landscape and drew on the post-impressionism of European painters like Cézanne.