The billiards table in the centre of Dunedin Public Art Gallery's Port Otago gallery is to help evoke the original setting of the Brangwyn murals, according to collections manager Robyn Notman.
The murals were commissioned in 1915 by George Winterbottom, a well-known figure in Manchester's financial world, for the billiards room in his home, Horton House.
As well as the four large murals hung on the aubergine-coloured walls surrounding the billiards table, other works by Brangwyn and some Jacobean and Jacobean revival pieces of furniture from the gallery's collections are on display.
"It is a way of evoking a space that references the original context without being too literal," she says.
Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) was a British painter particularly known for his murals.
"There was an idea the panels were left over from works Brangwyn made for the British pavilion in Venice, but that's not the case," Notman says.
When Horton House was demolished in 1936, Brangwyn was involved in the de-installation of the panels and took them back to his studio to do some remedial work before they were handed over to the Fine Art Society. Four were subsequently bought by the gallery. The other two large murals went to the National Art Gallery, now Te Papa.
Marcus Hanan, a Dunedin lawyer and chairman of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery committee brokered the deal with the Fine Art Society to buy the panels for 3000. The Sargood Trust purchased them for the gallery in 1951. The gallery in the Sargood wing, built in 1954 in the old Logan Park gallery, was designed to house them, according to Notman.
A handwritten letter from Brangwyn to Annette Pearse, the gallery's director at the time, is also on display: "The encouragement of British art is near to my heart. I'm very happy to think that my handiwork will be honoured by you. I wish the Otago art gallery every success," it says.
"I thought that was charming. It's very personalised. He didn't need to write but I think he was also quite concerned about the fate of these murals," Notman says.
Many of the other Brangwyn works on display come from the Hanan family collections.
Brangwyn was mostly self-taught although he also worked across a range of different media and did drawings, etchings, and designs for carpets and stained glass. Early in his career he worked for William Morris and was influenced by the aesthetic movement, Notman says.
"He valued human work and effort and the beauty in a day's labour, and the honesty of that, and you can see that in these panels," she says.
"People who work and use their bodies and manual labour to make a living - the joy of that really is the communion between all these people toiling on various projects and the way the artist interrelates the human figures and uses colour.
It's a very vibrant colour palette, almost like a tapestry. It's kind of decorative art, full of colour, a rich composition and subject matter that draws your eye to it."
Brangwyn's style has been described as a cross between muscular Art Nouveau and historicist baroque, she says.
"Sir Frank Brangwyn: Captain Winterbottom and the billiard room of Horton House" is part of "The Pleasure Principle: Collecting and Collectors", a major rehang in the downstairs galleries after "Angels and Aristocrats" came down to go to Auckland. It includes several exhibitions, mostly of works from the collection, many of which have not been seen for a long time.
In the adjoining gallery is "A.H. O'Keeffe: Light in the Shadows", a survey of the Dunedin artist (1858-1941) who was active during both the 1890s and the 1930s, two periods of great excitement and innovation for art in Dunedin, and continued to work in the intervening decades.
Curated by Ralph Body, it contains works from the gallery and other public and private New Zealand collections, among them one of his best-known works The Defence Minister's Telegram (1921) from the gallery's collections. It shows an elderly man receiving news of his son's death - O'Keeffe's two sons Lawrence and Victor were both killed in 1915 at Gallipoli.
Still to be hung in adjoining galleries are exhibitions of New Zealand landscapes and Japanese prints, as well as some old favourites from the collection, such as the gallery's works by Burn Jones and Tissot, Notman says.
See it
"Sir Frank Brangwyn: Captain Winterbottom and the billiard room of Horton House" is at Dunedin Public Art Gallery until February 17, 2013.
"A.H. O'Keeffe: Light in the Shadows" is at Dunedin Public Art Gallery until December 6.
