The artist Margaret Frankel organised a fundraising campaign to purchase Pleasure Garden and to gift it to Christchurch City Council as the owner of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery.

[7] Tony Green, Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland, described Hodgkins' work at this time as showing "suggestions of Braque's still lifes of the late twenties".

[10] Eastmond also proposes that the statue, unattended table, ’curiously placed cloth and oddly distinct black vase’ gives the painting a surrealist look that could be linked to the painter de Chirico.

[17] Notable contributors included Rita Angus, Heathcote Helmore, Douglas Lilburn, Ngaio Marsh, Colin McCahon, Olivia Spencer Bower and the Caxton Press.

After Margaret Frankel made an hour-long case for the work[21] the Christchurch City Council, on the recommendation of its artist advisors Archibald Nicoll, Richard Wallwork and Cecil Kelly,[22] declined to accept the painting for the Robert McDougall Art Gallery[23] claiming it to be "unintelligible".

The letter of artist Colin McCahon berated the council and its advisors: "These gentlemen must be very proud of the three tombs of dead art they have helped to preserve so well, and for so long in this city".

[26] The decision also created consternation throughout New Zealand with prominent arts people like John Beaglehole, James Bertram, Charles Brasch, Helen Hitchings, M. H. Holcroft, Fredrick Page, Douglas Lilburn, Mervin Taylor and Harry Tombs all writing to the mayor of Christchurch in protest.

"The dispute over the acceptance of the Pleasure Garden exposed the difficulty of implementing any kind of progressive plan for the Gallery if the advisory committee to purchase continued to represent 'only one school of painting'.

[30] John W. Kealy, chairman of the Auckland City Council's library committee, told reporters that "Paintings of this nature are of value in establishing interest in the gallery and making it alive".

[33] When Pleasure Garden was finally presented to the council as a gift in September the vote taken agreed to accept the painting into the Robert McDougall Art Gallery's collection.