Sir Miles Warren was a watercolour painter all his life. Drawing was integral to his professional career—he was Aotearoa New Zealand’s most prominent mid-20th century architect—and was also a personal passion.

The enchantment started early. Although art barely figured in his 1940s Christ’s College education, young Warren painted little watercolours during the school holidays. His training in the medium began in Ōtautahi Christchurch architecture studios, especially that of Cecil Wood (1878–1947), a superb illustrator who used watercolour paintings as tools of client persuasion. “Pretty pretties” was how Wood characterised these drawings; Warren would later apply the same self-deprecating term to his own watercolours.

In the evenings, Warren honed his drawing skills at the Ōtautahi atelier, where student architects prepared painstaking watercolour renderings of famous buildings of Greek and Roman antiquity. These “testimonies of study”, he wrote, constituted “the last flicker” of the Classically focused art and architecture curriculum prescribed since the mid-19th century by the influential École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. At Auckland University College’s School of Architecture, which Warren attended in 1949–50, drawing competence was also expected. For Warren, drawing was not merely a course requirement; it was a pleasure. Out of class, he made very painterly watercolours of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s cityscape and waterfront.

Warren continued to paint during his ‘OE’ in London in the early 1950s. Over the following four decades, as he and Maurice Mahoney built and led the successful architectural firm of Warren and Mahoney, his drawing was directed to professional ends (Warren and Mahoney then favoured the sketch over the model as a means of architectural representation). But Warren still found time to paint non-work subjects, and when, after his retirement in 1994, he heard that John Coley, a former director of Ōtautahi’s Robert McDougall Art Gallery, planned to go to Europe with his wife Fay and paint the ruins, he invited himself along. For a dozen years Warren accompanied the Coleys on annual European painting excursions, delighting in this self-conscious revival of the 18th century aristocratic watercolourist’s Grand Tour, and gracefully expressing on his sketch pad his formidable understanding of building form and profound appreciation of architectural detail.