Artist Robin White and poet Sam Hunt met in 1968 when they were both 22 years old. He was visiting Auckland to perform at the University Arts Festival and she had finished her Diploma of Fine Arts at Elam and was training to be a teacher. When Robin was offered a job at Mana College in Porirua in 1969, Sam found her a cottage to live in next to his at Bottle Creek on Paremata Harbour north of Wellington.

Their relationship was close, and the following October she painted this work, Sam Hunt, Bottle Creek 1970, the second of four major oil portraits she made of him in seven years. It is divided into three parts, like the triptych format traditionally used for altarpieces in churches. Sam wrote several poems which refer to Robin, including “A White Gentian” (1971): Remember Ruapehu, that mountain, six months ago? You sat in an alpine hut Sketching scoria, red rusted outcrops in the snow. I climbed some southern peak and made up the sort of song men climbing mountains sing: how, no longer your lover, I knew it was over.