On 28 November 1955 Colin McCahon wrote to Ron O’Reilly, a lifelong friend and supporter, about his current painting projects which included “A new Manukau series – with landscape boats bathers & seagulls – all very gay & summertime looking & painted in squares etc all parallel to the sides of the picture. A suggestion from Mondrian as a possible way of removing tragedy from representation. … as last year as in the ‘Manukau’ & the earlier still ‘Towards Auckland’ I found a grid of diagonals helped hold the image on the paper & freed the imagination to let the image expand – so with the new horizontal & vertical grid & hope to get to some revelation of happiness.” At this time McCahon had been living in Auckland for over two years (he arrived in June 1953), and had been focussing in his painting intensively on what he called the “domestic environment” of Titirangi and French Bay where he had bought a small house among the kauri sloping down to the Manukau Harbour. The two earlier series he mentions in the letter – Manukau and Towards Auckland – were among his first attempts to depict his new environment of bush and water, so different from the South Island landscapes he had previously painted. The diagonal grid he refers to owes much to his study of Cubism and his efforts to go beyond a merely “descriptive” approach to landscape. Now at the end of 1955 a new impetus manifested itself in the replacement of the diagonals with a vertical and horizontal grid owing much to the example of the great Dutch Modernist Piet Mondrian. McCahon’s interest in Mondrian in the 1960s (as in the famous homage Here I give thanks to Mondrian, 1961) is well-known but not this earlier manifestation of his engagement. Dates on the French Bay series of watercolours to which this work belongs enable the evolution of the series to be precisely plotted. One painting is dated 14 November, a second (the one being auctioned) 15 November, a third on 16 November, a fourth on 24 November; others followed in December. In general, the earliest examples are the most “descriptive” (in McCahon’s term), in the sense that, as in the present example, birds in the sky, boats on the water, and bathers in the sea or on the beach (as in the description in McCahon’s letter) are clearly identifiable. In later examples this is less so and abstract blocks of colour predominate. There is even (coincidentally) a description in the journal of Charles Brasch – another key friend and supporter – for 13 November (the day before McCahon began the series) of the very scene depicted. Brasch wrote: “Spent today with the McCahons at Titirangi; we sat on the beach before lunch while the children bathed, then all afternoon till dusk on their terrace platform that seems suspended amidst the forest”. The idyllic mood of Brasch’s account matches the sunny and benign atmosphere of this delightful painting, a “revelation of happiness” rare in the painter’s generally sombre output. PETER SIMPSON