We are very sad to lose one of this country’s most extraordinary thinkers and writers, Francis Pound.

‘Francis was a towering intellect and a lovely man,’ said Auckland University Press director Sam Elworthy. ‘I rank his book The Invention of New Zealand as about the deepest interrogation of the New Zealand mind and heart that we have. It was many years in the making and a triumph of thinking and writing.’

Francis Pound was an independent art curator and writer who taught for some years in the art history department of The University of Auckland. His books included Frames on the Land: Early Landscape Painting in New Zealand (1983), The Space Between: Pakeha Use of Maori Motifs in Modernist New Zealand Art (1994), a book to accompany the exhibition Walters en Abyme, which he also curated, and The Invention of New Zealand (2009).