The Southern Sounds

The Southern Sounds of Fiordland — the least accessible part of New Zealand's already remote southwest — provided John Gully with subjects of extraordinary wild beauty that he was among the first artists to document. These sounds, deep fjords carved by glaciation and barely navigated even in Gully's time, combined vertical cliffs, dark water, and continuous rainfall in an environment of sublime grandeur. His watercolors from the sounds were effectively the first artistic documentation of landscapes that remained essentially unknown until the twentieth century.

The southern sounds' character — darker, more remote, more dramatically enclosed than the northern fjords — requires different atmospheric handling from Gully's Milford Sound subjects. The endemic light quality of the deep southern fjords, filtered through almost constant cloud, creates a pervasive grey-green atmosphere quite unlike the sunlit conditions of his Nelson coast subjects. Gully captures this distinctive atmospheric character through carefully controlled tonal values.