Dame Louise Etiennette Sidonie Henderson DBE (née Sauze, 21 April 1902 – 27 June 1994) was a French-New Zealand artist and painter.
[1] She was married to Hubert by proxy at the British Embassy in Paris before emigrating to New Zealand in 1925 and settling with her husband in Christchurch where she began studies at the Canterbury School of Art.
[1] In the early 1940s Henderson moved to Wellington and became interested in modernist concerns after seeing a number of cubist inspired paintings by John Weeks, with whom she was corresponding.
[2] 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.
[3]: 141 Henderson's Canterbury paintings of hills, gorges and architectural forms blend observation with the visual language and aesthetic theories of the European moderns – Manet, Cézanne, Picasso and Braque.
Her movement away from the topographical view of the landscape was shared by other local artists such as brothers James and Alfred Cook, Rita Angus, Roland Hipkins and Christopher Perkins.
In the 1960s she was frequently professionally linked with the abstract painter Milan Mrkusich; they completed stained glass designs for the Church of the Holy Cross in Henderson, Auckland, and were also part of a touring exhibition of New Zealand artists' work sent to Brussels, London and Paris in 1965–66.
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.
Art Galleries throughout Auckland and Christchurch were trying to locate April from The "Twelve Months" series for the exhibition Louise Henderson: From Life.