Patrick Hanly created a new way of looking at New Zealand’s land and people through his paintings, “as a nation that belonged to the young and the adventurous, to the dreamers and to those who could see the vital place the island nation could have within Polynesia and the broader Pacific.”

Also a keen sailor, anti-nuclear and anti-apartheid activist, Hanly’s work was joyful, impatient and lively, using bright, flat colour and sharp outlines to express the bright Pacific light, different environment and vibrant life in living things that inspired him. Balanced with his social and political conscience, his works, often of family and friends, are observational and reflective of the human.

Patrick Hanly (born Palmerston North, 1932 – 2004) enrolled at Ilam School of Art, University of Canterbury in 1952, and received the Turner Prize for landscape painting in 1953. Hanly then travelled to Europe with his partner and later wife, photographer Gil Hanly, where they both went to the Chelsea School of Art, returning to New Zealand in 1962 where Hanly completed a number of large public murals and lectured at Auckland University. Te Papa Tongarewa have 49 of his works.