above: Peter Campbell, Kapiti Island, New Zealand, undated.
The Peter Campbell Collection comprises 16 watercolours by London-based expatriate artist Peter Campbell, generously gifted by his family to Toi MAHARA in 2025. Toi MAHARA was suggested as one of four repositories in New Zealand for Peter’s work as he had made a number of watercolours depicting the Kāpiti coast.
Peter Campbell was born in Wellington in 1937. He went to Kelburn Primary School, Wellington College and Victoria University, graduating in philosophy. He became a book designer and illustrator and worked for School Publications in late 1950s. He was apprenticed to Denis Glover at Wingfield Press before leaving to live in London in 1960. In the 1970s, he was a founder of the London Review of Books, producing covers for the LRB right up until his death in 2011.
He designed for books, exhibition catalogues, magazines and posters in the 1960s and 1970s. He was also a journalist, editor, publisher, illustrator and author of children’s books.
Peter Campbell left New Zealand to pursue a highly successful professional life abroad. His work is well known and loved by many in British and international contexts. In this sense his work can be related to Frances Hodgkins, who rather later in her life, also achieved great success, her work having been selected to represent the UK in the 1940 Venice Biennale.