Reframing an era: Were celebrated Pākehā portrait painters guilty of exploiting Māori?

Artist Charles F Goldie leafs through a book on his tea break. Perched on a chair in the studio, his model, Waikato chief Pātara Te Tuhi, waits patiently. To his left, propped up on an easel, is what seems to be a completed portrait showing the celebrated chief sitting staunch and solemn in full traditional dress, the large hei-tiki, shark’s tooth earring and woven cloak signifying an aged but noble chief.

For readers of the 1901 issue of New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, the portrait ascribes to the romantic notion of a dying race, one of Goldie’s “rest-home Māoris” wrote one commentator, decked out in old-time cloaks, tiki and pendants. But there is something else going on here.

Holding his cup of tea, Te Tuhi appears relaxed. Below the cloak are glimpses of the rangatira’s everyday attire – cuffed trousers and leather shoes. Behind the artist is a neat pile of folded clothes: hat, shirt, waistcoat. For Goldie, says Roger Blackley, associate professor in art history at Victoria University of Wellington, the photo would have been good publicity, showing the world he had this very famous rangatira as a model, “but it would be wrong to say Te Tuhi is simply a passive prop in Goldie’s colonising agenda”.

Such portraits undoubtedly fed into the conception of a doomed but noble race. As lawyer Richard Singer wrote in 1903, Goldie’s work presents “a true and a brilliant impression not only of the habits and customs, but of the very character, the very life, the idiosyncrasies of nature and of feature of the Māori – characteristics that in a few short years it will no longer be possible to represent, for the old chiefs and chieftainesses, and the old warriors whom this artist chooses as his models, are the last of their race; the tattooed man is dying out.”

For the colonisers, of course, the “dying race” line was convenient. As Blackley says, “How do you solve access to Māori resources or land? You solve it by the disappearance of the owner.” But, although derided by many contemporary art historians, these Victorian-era paintings also carried and continue to carry considerable value for Māori.

This was made apparent to Blackley when, as a curator at the Auckland Art Gallery, the Te Māori exhibition ended its spectacular run there in 1987. A collection of Māori portraits by Bohemian-born artist Gottfried Lindauer generated an outpouring of emotion among Māori visitors.

An accompanying exhibition of Goldie’s hyper-realist portraits of elderly Māori subjects was packed with awestruck Māori visitors. “Māori do have a real sense of ownership of this corpus of portraits,” says Blackley, “especially if they are related.”

In his new book, Galleries of Maoriland, Blackley explores the strangely uncharted territory of Māori reception of such works.

For them, these seemingly romanticised depictions of doomed “old-time” Māori were in fact testimony to survival, “and an essential link between past and present Māori culture”.