Louise Henderson

Dame Louise Etiennette Sidonie Henderson (née Sauze, 21 April 1902 – 27 June 1994) was a French-New Zealand artist and painter.

Life

Louise Etiennette Sidonie Sauze was born on 21 April 1902 at Boulogne sur Seine, Paris, France, the only child of Lucie Jeanne Alphonsine Guerin and her husband, Daniel Paul Louis Sauze, secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Louise remembered how as a child she would go with her father to Rodin's house at Meudon and play with chips of marble while the men talked.

In Paris she met her future husband Hubert Henderson, a New Zealander. Hubert returned to New Zealand in 1923 and proposed to Louise, but propriety demanded that a single woman not travel alone to New Zealand.

In 1933, she gave birth to their only child, a daughter Diane.

Henderson died in Auckland on 27 June 1994, aged 92. During World War II she worked for The Correspondence School; she championed embroidery at this time, writing in the periodical Art in New Zealand and a manual which was published by the Army Education Welfare Service in 1945.

In 1950, the family moved to Auckland and she attended the Elam School of Art but was frustrated by its conservatism. She continued to work in John Weeks's studio, however, and her work in this period became increasingly abstract and intellectual.

Major exhibitions

1935–1938: Henderson's first exhibition was with the New Zealand Society of Artists in Christchurch. She exhibited many times with the Society between 1935 and 1938.

Works

In 1960, Henderson was commissioned to make stained-glass windows and a metal crucifix for the Church of the Holy Cross in Henderson. The work stands 3 metres high at the entrance to the church. In 1963 she was commissioned to produce a work for the New Zealand Room at the Hilton Hotel in Hong Kong: a mural, executed in wool, in 24 colours and measuring 1.5 x 6 metres.