Lake Manapouri

John Gully's watercolor of Lake Manapouri (1887) depicts one of New Zealand's most celebrated natural landscapes — the lake in Fiordland that later became the center of an iconic conservation campaign in the 1970s to prevent its waters being raised for hydroelectric purposes. In Gully's time the lake was essentially unknown to most New Zealanders, and his paintings served as introduction and documentation of landscapes that few would ever visit directly. The lake's unusual shoreline, studded with islands and surrounded by forest-covered hills, provided Gully with compositional opportunities quite different from his fjord subjects.

Gully builds the lake scene through the careful management of water surface, reflection, and the relationship between the forested shores and the sky above. The multiple islands of Lake Manapouri create compositional interest through overlapping forms that establish depth. His handling of the native bush around the lakeshore develops his botanical observation of New Zealand vegetation alongside the atmospheric qualities of the mountain lake environment.