Evelyn Page Retirement Village
Care is not an ‘add on’ at a Ryman village, it is built into the fabric of our villages from the very beginning. It’s comforting for couples and friends to know they can still be near each other even if their health needs are different.
Evelyn Page care centre offers a range of care options including resthome, hospital and specialist dementia care. Like all aspects of our villages, we constantly look for ways to improve both the care we provide and the innovation behind it. Care is customised using our myRyman Care app and residents love the food in our seasonal Delicious menu, which is prepared fresh on site by village chefs.
Evelyn Page is one of over 90% of established Ryman villages that have been awarded 4-year certification by the Ministry of Health. It’s recognised as the ‘gold standard’ in care.
Each Ryman village is named in honour of a Kiwi or Aussie trailblazer: Anthony Wilding, Lady Diana Isaac, Evelyn Page. They pushed further and set the bar high for others to aspire to. In creating communities that challenge the expectations of ageing, Ryman villages are also setting the bar high. They’re demonstrating that a retirement lifestyle brimming with new experiences, connections and fulfilment is something we should aspire to. Our Kiwi and Aussie namesakes represent the measure of inspiration, while Ryman villages represent the measure of retirement living.
Evelyn Page (1899 – 1988)
Christchurch born Evelyn Page’s talent and passion significantly influenced New Zealand’s modernist art movement.
Intending to follow her father’s footsteps into bookkeeping, Evelyn changed tact and shifted mid-schooling to the Canterbury College School of Art. Here she embraced her love for art and began a career that spanned seven decades focussing on landscapes, nudes, still life and portraits.
With a desire to challenge the New Zealand art world’s traditional approach, Page became a founding member of a modernist association of artists in 1927, later known as The Group. Members of The Group exhibited unrestrained, avant-garde art annually over 50 years to introduce a less rigid artistic approach to the New Zealand art world. One Auckland exhibition of Page’s female nudes created a controversy that raged in the newspapers for weeks!
Page was the first recipient of the Governor-General’s Art Award, a Fellow of the NZ Academy of Fine Arts, and was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her services to art in 1987.
Leaving behind seven decades worth of vibrant works, Page created innovative art that celebrated colour and portrayed the nuances of human character. She is recognized as “a painter with extraordinary zest and independence of spirit, whose lifetime response to human character and very individual use of rich colour communicates her vivid reverence and joyful celebration of life”.
Published in 1986, Janet Paul’s biography Evelyn Page: Seven Decades outlines the artist’s work in-depth.
