Leo Bensemann Portrait by Rita Angus

Giclee Print

Print size in millimetres (approx): 310 x 420 (including a narrow unprinted border around the image)

Extremely high quality modern print taken from a minutely detailed high resolution scan of the original portrait painting, true to life colour and crisp detail that is simply first class - from a 2022 collection that is the best quality series of reproduction prints of famous NZ paintings we have seen. Writing in “New Zealand Art at Te Papa” Jill Trevelyan describes this key portrait painting of Angus’s close friend Leo Bensemann (a designer and printer at the Caxton Press for most of his life) as “an intense, charismatic young man who holds the viewer’s attention with his challenging stare. Angus has planned the composition with care, exaggerating the lean angular planes of her subject’s face so that the V of his chin and jacket echo the diagonal movement established by the plunging mountains. The effect is one of restrained masculine energy, which is enhanced by the close cropping of Bensemann’s figure. He seems about to burst out of the frame.”