The panels were painted by Russell Clark and depict scenes from the 1860s Central Otago gold rush.
They were commissioned by the owners of the City Hotel in 1936, the Masetti family, and moved to a Bannockburn winery shed when the hotel was demolished in 1986 and then-owner Stewart Elms started Felton Road Vineyard.
The panels, smoke damaged in the 1952 hotel fire, sat at the back of the shed until Mr Elms sought advice from Central Otago artist Sir Grahame Sydney about what to do with them.
Sir Grahame said the pile of large, yellowing and rather home-made-looking murals were immediately of interest.
‘‘I made it clear that propped up against a dark, rear wall of a winery shed was no place for such objects.
‘‘They deserved a better home, like a museum, and I knew exactly which one.’’
It was clear to Sir Grahame that someone had touched up the panels, but he doubted Mr Elms’ claim he had commissioned Clark to do it in 1962.
‘‘l very much doubt that Clark, in full flight as an Ilam tutor and busy modernist sculptor in 1962, only a couple of years before he died, would have been interested in spending time restoring 27 painted panels.
‘‘He was scarcely painting anything at that stage.’’
So the questions remained about who breathed new life into the historic depictions of the region’s gold fever, and when.
The gold rush panels are to go on display at Central Stories Museum and Art Gallery in Alexandra until the end of next month.
Central Stories Museum and Art Gallery manager Paula Stephenson said the pieces were bought by the museum from Mr Elms for $30,000.
Clark was 31 and painted the series of panels allegedly to pay off his food and drink bill at the hotel, although that could not be verified.
Clark’s techniques included airbrushing, stencilling and using a projector to enlarge his paper drawings.
After the 1952 fire the smoke-damage panels were touched up and there was evidence of further work on them in the Dunedin scenes, particularly where the City Hotel had a sign saying ‘‘City Hotel, C.S. Elms Propr’’.
Mr Elms did not buy the hotel until several years after the panels were painted.
Ms Stephenson said engaging an art conservator would be the only way to determine what the panels were painted on, as there was a question over that too, but photographs taken at the City Hotel in the 1950s and 1960s could give a clue as to when the panels were repainted.
It seemed unlikely to have been in 1962, 10 years after the fire, she said.
Clark was well-known by then and it seemed odd there was no record of him working on the panels again.
It was likely the hotel would have advertised he was there as the publicity would have been good for their business, Ms Stephenson said.
Clark moved to Wellington in the late 1930s and worked for magazines and journals, including the New Zealand Listener and the School Journal.
