Northland Panels
landscape painting by Colin McCahon
Northland Panels is an eight-part landscape painted by the New Zealand artist Colin McCahon in November 1958 shortly after his first and only trip to the United States.
Genesis
In April 1958, Colin McCahon and his wife Anne traveled to the United States. At the time McCahon was working at the Auckland City Art Gallery (now known as Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki) as Keeper of Collections and the main purpose of the trip was to look at how public art galleries operated. During the visit, however, he was also able to see major works of art by American artists for the first time. He was particularly impressed by large scale works by Richard Diebenkorn and Jackson Pollock and also saw Picasso's large-scale painting Guernica.
On his return to New Zealand in July, McCahon at first found the close damp bush surrounding the family home in Titirangi to be oppressive but he then began to work outside on the deck of the house. Here he painted a very large work on long strips of canvas inspired by the rugged landscape of Northland that he titled Northland Panels.
McCahon had been attracted to the Northland landscape for some time and the family had friends in the area. Much later in 1977 he attempted to articulate his attraction to this place, ‘The real Far North of New Zealand is unlike any other part of the land. I can’t talk about it.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Northland Panels” is landscape painting by Colin McCahon. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Northland, Panels and landscape, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “landscape painting by Colin McCahon” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q123125697. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1958 and 1977.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow Northland Panels primary sources, Northland Panels archive and Northland research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Northland Panels” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.