Charles Frederick Goldie
Aotearoa New Zealand, b.1870, d.1947
Ina te Papatahi, a Ngāpuhi Chieftainess (Te Ngahengahe, Ngāpuhi)
- Presented by the family of James Jamieson 1932
- Oil on canvas
- 853 x 955mm
- 69/78
- 1902
Location: Sir Robertson and Lady Stewart Gallery
Tags: Maori (culture or style), chieftains, earrings (jewelry), elderly, green (color), jades (objects), jewelry, koru (pattern), moko, people (agents), pipes (smoking equipment), portraits, scarves (costume accessories), spirals (geometric figures), tattoos, women (female humans), yellow (color)
Ina te Papatahi lived at the Waipapa Māori hostel in Mechanics Bay, Tāmakimakaurau / Auckland, not far from Charles Goldie’s Hobson Street studio. She sat for him many times, the first time in 1902. The niece of prominent Ngāpuhi rangatira (chiefs) Eruera Maihi Patuone and Tāmati Waka Nene, both signatories of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, she was well-connected and introduced Goldie to many other Māori who agreed to sit for him. Ina te Papatahi was later remembered by Goldie’s friend, the writer and historian James Cowan, for her “very likeable nature”, “keen sense of humour” and the “great interest [she took] in the painting of her portrait”.
(Te Wheke, 2020)

He Waka Eke Noa, 18 February 2017 – 18 February 2018
Ina Te Papatahi (Te Ngahengahe, Ngāpuhi) was a niece of the prominent Ngāpuhi chiefs Eruera Maihi Patuone and Tāmati Waka Nene, both early signatories of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Ina Te Papatahi lived at the Waipapa Māori hostel in Mechanic’s Bay, Auckland, not far from Charles Goldie’s Hobson Street studio. She sat for him many times and introduced him to many of his other Māori sitters. This likeness belongs to the period when Goldie started painting portraits of elderly Māori with moko, as both memorable subjects and “noble relics of a noble race”. It also reflects the impact of his four and a half years studying in Paris from 1893, where influences included the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn, whose portraits he studied and several times copied.
Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016
Ina Te Papatahi lived in Auckland at the Waipapa Māori hostel in Mechanic’s Bay, a short walk from Charles Goldie’s Hobson Street studio. She became one of his favourite models, and evidently introduced him to other important sitters.
Goldie sent this portrait to show at the Canterbury Society of Arts annual exhibition in 1903, where it was purchased by the local construction company manager and art collector James Jamieson. Following Jamieson’s death in 1927, this portrait and many other paintings from his collection were presented to become part of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery's founding collection.
Ina Te Papatahi was one of Charles Goldie’s favourite models and this is one of his earliest portraits of her. Goldie specialised in painting realistic portraits of Māori. He sought out elderly subjects, particularly those wearing traditional moko (facial tattoo). With thin glazes of oil paint on finely grained canvas, and using fine brushes, Goldie shows great skill in depicting the wrinkled skin, the hair and the gauzy thinness of Ina Te Papatahi’s yellow scarf.
Born in Auckland, Goldie was the son of a prosperous timber merchant. He began exhibiting at the Auckland Society of Arts when he was 15 and still at school. He studied with the professional painter Louis J. Steele in Auckland before leaving for Paris to study at the Académie Julian. On his return to Auckland in 1898 he began to specialise in Māori portraits. In 1920 Goldie went to Sydney but alcoholism and ill health prompted his return to New Zealand in 1922. (Label date unknown)
Charles Frederick Goldie specialised in painting realistic portraits of Maori. He sought out the elderly subjects who still wore the traditional tattoo or moko. Often his subjects were depicted in passive, almost melancholic poses, a manner that often belied their true spirit.
The subject of this portrait, Ena te Papatahi, was a Ngapuhi chieftainess from the Hokianga, and was the niece of Tamati Waka Nene. When she was widowed in 1866 Ena moved to Auckland where she lived in the Orakei Valley caring for the ailing chief Eru Patuone.
After 1900 she lived at the Auckland Maori Hostel with her cousin Harata Rewiri Tarapata and became a familiar identity around the city. Goldie first painted her in 1902, the year of this portrait, which is one of his earliest studies of her.
Over the years, up until her death in around 1910, Ena te Papatahi became one of his favourite models and the subject of around seventeen paintings. Early reproductions of this work made it a familiar image to a generation of New Zealanders. (Label date unknown)
Related reading: Treasury: a generous legacy, Te Wheke
film

Goldie Portraits
Art historian and curator Jonathan Mané-Wheoki talks about Goldie's portraits of Maori. From the Canterbury Television programme City Life on the occasion of the 1998 exhibition of Goldie's works curated by Roger Blackley and toured by the Auckland Art Gallery.
Reproduced with the generous permission of Canterbury Television.
film

Charles Fredrick Goldie - Ena te Papatahi A Ngapuhi Chieftainess
An introduction to Charles Fredrick Goldie's Ena te Papatahi A Ngapuhi Chieftainess (1902), narrated by New Zealand actor Sam Neill.
Commentary

Temples for Curious Minds
I want to tell you a story. A ‘curiodyssey’ (which by the way, I thought I’d made up but is the name of an actual museum in California). So, a curiodyssey of happy places, told through the science of wellbeing.
Commentary

Identities of Journey and Return
It was the novelty of seeing white people rendered by a Japanese artist that tickled me when I first saw Utagawa Sadahide’s woodblock prints of foreigners in Yokohama in the 1860s. There’s something slightly clumsy about the Westerners’ exaggerated noses and the forced rounding of their eyes. You can sense, in these images, the artist’s struggle to detach himself from the conventions of Japanese art and beauty; his lines waver here, unlike his assertive depictions of long, flat Japanese faces in earlier prints.
Commentary

Where in the World? Placing New Zealand in the Pacific
“It is a strange fact that New Zealand can be literally all at sea in the Pacific Ocean, and yet pay that ocean, and neighbours and relations within it, so little attention.”
— Damon Salesa, Sāmoan historian
“… this small and very British country is producing some honest and lively artists whose eyes open upon a land not at all like England, but whose minds are formed in the living tradition of Western culture.”
— Helen Hitchings, New Zealand gallerist
Commentary

The Seas are Rising: So Are We
In Te Ao Māori the whakataukī “He toka tū moana” pays homage to the rock that withstands the sea as a metaphor for human strength in our cultural or political beliefs, whatever may come. But while the rock is steadfast, the octopus Te Wheke is a shape-shifter, canny and malleable.
Commentary

Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania
Every few years, the curatorial team at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū embarks on a major rehang of the first-floor collection area. It’s no small undertaking finding fresh ways to combine long-held, well-known works and new acquisitions, looking for combinations that will offer compelling viewing, immersive storytelling and intellectual engagement to our wide and evolving visitor base. This time, director Blair Jackson added another dimension to our task, challenging us to reimagine the physical orientation of the spaces to encourage visitors to interact with the architecture in a completely different way.
Notes

Massive wall painting marks opening of Te Wheke at Christchurch Art Gallery
A 36-metre painting by artist Kelcy Taratoa is part of a new exhibition opening at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū on Saturday.
Exhibition
Kelcy Taratoa: Te Tāhū o ngā Maunga Tūmatakahuki
A vast painting by Kelcy Taratoa about how we are bound together.
Notes

Te Wheke celebrates Ōtautahi Christchurch’s place in the Pacific
An immersive exhibition that explores art through our connections with the Pacific will be unveiled at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū on 30 May.
Notes

He Ara / Pathways
Aotearoa New Zealand is part of a submerged Pacific continent, which broke away from the Gondwana supercontinent millions of years ago to create two major islands – Te Ika a Māui / the North Island and Te Waipounamu / the South Island.
Notes

Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania
Welcome – nau mai haere mai. Kei Te Ararau o Tangaroa / Pathways Across Oceania is an attempt to understand the Gallery’s collection from the perspective of our place in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean. Full of stories of migration, connection and belonging, this huge new exhibition reflects the connections and tensions that shape our past, present and future.
Notes

Puta Noa I Te Ao / In the World
Artists from Aotearoa New Zealand are often well-travelled. Feeling the distance of Aotearoa from the world’s centres of art, they have often been drawn overseas to study and work, contributing to the art history of their adopted countries as well as this one.
Notes

Hawaiki Tautau Atu, Hawaiki Tautau Mai / A Distance Draws Near
Hawaiki is the ancient homeland of Polynesian people who navigated the seas in double-hulled waka from Rarotonga, Tahiti and Ra’iātea to the islands of the Pacific Ocean, including Aotearoa New Zealand.
Notes

Ko Enei Tauira Ataahua / These Beautiful Patterns
From a present-day perspective, the appropriation of customary Māori art forms and practice by Pākehā artists can be disconcerting, a more-than-awkward crossing of cultural lines.
Notes

He Toka Tū Moana
The Māori whakataukī or proverb “He toka tū moana” uses the image of a rock that stands firmly in the ocean to describe someone steadfast and strong in their culture or beliefs, who defies all opposition.
Notes

Ātea
In te ao Māori, the state of a space when cleared of obstruction is called ātea. This concept was brought to Aotearoa New Zealand from the islands of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa / the Pacific Ocean by Polynesian ancestors.
Notes

I Tawhiti Ra Ano / From Distant Shores
The islands of Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa / the Pacific were settled by remarkable ocean voyagers over many thousands of years. Aotearoa New Zealand was peopled through major waves of migration from the 1200s and later the mid-1800s. The seas of Oceania are like vast pathways; ever-present reminders of distant shores.
Notes

Kanohi Ki Te Kanohi / Face To Face
In te ao Māori, portraiture can encompass rangatiratanga (stewardship), whanaungatanga (kinship or connectedness), manaakitanga (kindness towards others) and whakapapa (ancestral genealogy). A sense of wairua (the spirit of a person) also resonates within these treasured portraits.
Notes

Paerangi / The Fold in the Sky
The connection between land and sky is important in te ao Māori. In Māori creation, Papatūānuku (the earth mother) was separated from Ranginui (the sky father) by their children, creating Te Ao Mārama, the world of light.
Director's Foreword

Director’s Foreword
Welcome to the autumn issue of Bulletin. Here at the Gallery, we’re about to move into a major changeover as we rehang our upstairs collection galleries. When they reopen again on 10 April, the whole space will have been given over to a major new exhibition.
Collection

George Albert Steel, Elizabeth Pulman King Tāwhiao Tukaroto Matutaera Pōtatau Te Wherowhero (Ngāti Mahuta, Tainui)
Tāwhiao, the second Māori king, visited Elizabeth Pulman’s Photographic Rooms in Tāmakimakaurau / Auckland in January 1882 as part of a grand tour of the city to mark the end of his rule in Te Rohe Pōtae or ‘the King Country’ – a seventeen-year-long resistance by Waikato-Tainui peoples to colonisation. Having admired an impressive collection of portraits of other rangatira (chiefs), Tāwhiao returned a few days later to choose several for himself. At this visit, Tāwhiao also arranged to return in a few days for his own sitting. The result was this impressive portrait by George Steel, Pulman’s principal photographer.
Collection

Robin White, Ruha Fifita We are the Small Axe
The title of this tapa is a line from The Wailers’ song ‘Small Axe’. The artists use it to refer to struggles against colonial control in the Pacific, in particular Éloi Machoro, a leader of the Kanak pro-independence movement FLNKS, who smashed a ballot box with an axe in protest against the French territorial election in New Caledonia in 1984. Robin White and Ruha Fifita have collaborated on several tapa. White says, “We have created a hybrid artwork that integrates ancestral patterns and traditional design with contemporary imagery and pictorial narrative. The past is an anchor, a marker by which you can navigate forward.”Navigation is one of the themes in this work – the central shape is reminiscent of a vaka (canoe) filled with traditional and contemporary imagery being guided through the ocean by tuna (longfin eels) and fish. Tuna in particular are renowned for their extraordinary migratory journey from Aotearoa New Zealand to Tonga along the Kermadec Trench, locations that connect these two artists.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

John Henry Menzies Stanford Family Pātaka Cabinet
John Henry Menzies first took up woodcarving as a youth in Lancashire, England. He immigrated to Aotearoa New Zealand aged twenty-one in 1860, and began farming on Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū / Banks Peninsula in 1877. Menzies’ interest in Māori art began in about 1882. He is unlikely to have encountered whakairo (carving) and kōwhaiwhai (rafter patterns) as living traditions until visiting Ōhinemutu in Rotorua five years later. Captivated by what he felt were endangered art forms, he filled two of three houses he built at Kiri-kiri-wairea / McIntosh Bay (later Menzies Bay) and a church at Little Akaloa with extraordinary Māori-inspired furniture and decoration. His most spectacular pieces were made for family members – this highly decorative pātaka cabinet was made for his daughter Charlotte and her husband Edwin Stanford.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

John Pule Not of This Time (Dreamland)
“The sky is second only to the sea as a mass that fills my imagination with awe.” —John Pule
John Pule was born in Niue and at a young age moved with his parents to Tāmakimakaurau / Auckland. He returned to his home country as an artist, poet and writer in 1991. Inventive in his adaptation of traditional art forms, Pule’s work considers Pacific and migrant cultures, often provocatively. In this work, the blue clouds may also be islands. He says:Blue is associated with travel, knowledge, family and scenes from the Bible, but mostly the blue is the Pacific. The Pacific collects and shares all that we know about ourselves. In that period of cloud paintings I incorporated Niue creation stories, islands, the ocean (especially crossing the Pacific going to Niue or from elsewhere to Aotearoa).
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Exhibition
Te Wheke: Pathways Across Oceania
Experience the Gallery’s collection from the perspective of our place in Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean.
Collection

Neil Pardington Te Whare o Rangiora (Chair)
Neil Pardington photographed this chair in a long-abandoned psychiatric hospital in Porirua while he was looking for locations for a short film. This is one of a number of photographs the artist has taken capturing strange and soulless places in which personal and significant life events are processed. In this image, time stands still and you can sense the institutional boredom, confinement and frustration pressing in. Pardington likened the kōwhaiwhai patterns drawn in marker pen on the chair arms to “a cry for help from within an asylum with no spiritual hope of any kind”. However, they could also be read as a wilful insertion of cultural values and meaning, a defiant visual protest against the banal hospital interior.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Ani O'Neill 'etu iti
“Though people may not see my work as political – it is. I want to re-ignite something inside the viewer that they may have forgotten existed; the ‘Pacific Island way’ of creating the world.” —Ani O’Neill In Cook Islands Māori, 'etu iti means ‘little stars’. This work was inspired by sacred objects from Oceania that are usually never seen or touched: bundles of fine sticks bound with feathers collected from Hawai'i long ago and now held in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, England. It was created for an exhibition in which artists responded to the museum’s collections. Interested in “passing on the flame to light new paths”, Ani O’Neill worked with the help of local school children. She often works collaboratively, empowering people through art making. Through this process she upholds Polynesian values, using her work to foster a sense of community rather than elitism. She also chooses everyday materials, and by elevating their status she challenges the western hierarchy of materials and art forms.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Angela Tiatia Lick
With Lick, Angela Tiatia presents a balancing act between resistance and vulnerability. Filmed in Tuvalu, a South Pacific nation endangered by rising sea levels because of global warming, it shows how environmental, political and cultural issues can intersect.Because of the actions (and inaction) of much larger nations, Tuvaluans face losing their homeland and irreplaceable aspects of their culture within the next fifty years. As Tiatia fights to hold her position on a small piece of coral, we glimpse her malu – a traditional leg tattoo and adornment specific to Samoan women – through the shifting water. Associated with cultural responsibilities, sheltering and protection, the malu emphasises both Tiatia’s Oceanic heritage and the need to protect its people and their way of life.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Lisa Reihana Sex Trade, Gift for Banks, Dancing Lovers, Sextant Lesson (18550) (19205)
In 2008 Lisa Reihana was visiting Sydney where, by chance, she saw an exhibition of a French neo-classical wallpaper that had been printed almost exactly two hundred years earlier, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (savages of the Pacific Ocean). It depicted the explorations of Captain James Cook in twenty panels. The exhibition label, recalled Reihana, “said how it was about the people of the Pacific. I could not see it. I thought that the piece itself was a marvel, but I just couldn’t see the Pacific in it at all.”Inspired by Les Sauvages, in 2015 Reihana made In Pursuit of Venus [infected], a 26-metre panoramic video in which vignettes of Pasifika, Aboriginal, Pākehā and Māori characters are superimposed over the idyllic Pacific landscapes imagined two centuries ago on the other side of the world. Reihana’s narratives of sexual violence, trade, dance, exploration, misunderstandings, conflict and violent incidents challenge colonial stereotypes, giving agency to indigenous peoples and adding nuance to colonial histories. “I hope that as a viewer you’re always trying to work out what exactly is going on in this work”, says Reihana. “Just like these historical figures would have. When you suddenly meet new people and new things are happening, you have to decipher and make sense of the world yourself. There will always be lots of misunderstanding – layers of misunderstanding.” This work is a panoramic photographic print derived from In Pursuit of Venus [infected]. It combines different interactions between English sailors and Pasifika peoples. While Cook’s botanist Joseph Banks – who gave his name to Banks Peninsula – takes a chief’s wife to his tent, two sailors approach some seated Tahitian women. One of the sailors coughs and spits blood on the ground. They smile and hold up two spike nails as a suggested trade...
(We do this, 12 May 2018 - 26 May 2019)
Collection

Yuki Kihara After Tsunami Galu Afi, Lalomanu (2013)
Dressed in Victorian black, Salome laments the impact of colonial histories on Samoan life and culture. A persona developed by Yuki Kihara, she is like a spectre or apparition, created in response to past events.These works are part of a series in which Salome pays witness to Samoa in the aftermath of 2012’s Cyclone Evan. In each work, Salome is positioned with her back or profile to the viewer, guiding our gaze towards landscape, environment, monuments and architecture – opening a space for us to enter. We are Salome’s guests, but she controls our gaze. We are not witness to people in states of shock or trauma, nor are we invited to view panoramas of devastation. Instead she performs in a quiet way, slowing things down and letting the juxtaposition between the dress, the landscape and architecture fill each image with a complex range of senses, ideas and emotions.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Charles Frederick Goldie Study from Life or One of the Old School, Wiremu Watene Tautari (Ngāti Whātua)
Wiremu Watene Tautari was one of Charles Goldie’s earliest Māori portrait sitters – according to his descendants he met Goldie through the timber shipping business. Tautari was a merchant who ran a substantial kauri trade between the upper Waitematā Harbour and the timber mills of Tāmakimakaurau / Auckland, including one at Commercial Bay operated by the artist’s father, David Goldie, who was also the city’s mayor at the time. As a small boy, Tautari was present in 1841 when Ngāti Whātua gave the Crown the land that would become central Auckland. When almost complete loss of lands followed, he was active throughout his long life in campaigning for the return of Ngāti Whātua rights and land.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection
![Untitled [T & G Mural]](/media/cache/9f/d5/9fd5852f5ee4caad2eb183e732a8b9bf.jpg)
Russell Clark Untitled [T & G Mural]
Russell Clark’s spectacular composite mural, a modernist architectural relic, was created to decorate the foyer of the (now demolished) T & G Insurance Building in Ōtautahi / Christchurch. It was one of many murals by Clark, who was a painter, sculptor, illustrator and art school university lecturer. Against a variegated green background, juxtaposed raised amorphous and geometric shapes resemble fish, fishhooks and whakairo (carving) motifs. Clark has also used pieces of domestic crockery to make ceramic mosaics. Completing the arrangement are hand-worked amoeba-like forms in copper, pewter and brass. This mural reveals Clark’s active engagement with Pacific forms and his keen sense of the contemporary moderne architectural moment.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Article

Trove
Recounting the untold stories behind some of the works in the exhibition Treasury: A Generous Legacy, curator Ken Hall also underlines the value of art philanthropy.
Exhibition
Treasury: A Generous Legacy
Stunning proof of the impact of generosity on the Christchurch collection.
Notes

Study (Woman in a wide black hat) by Raymond McIntyre
This article first appeared as 'The Muse' in The Press on 25 August 2015.
Collection

Shane Cotton The Haymaker Series I–V
Haymaker suggests the act of making at the right moment in time. It’s also a boxing term for a powerful punch. In this massive, psychedelic, sci-fi-like painting, Shane Cotton has gathered together signs, symbols and references with elements from past paintings and unloaded them into the ether of te pito o te ao, the centre of the Māori universe. Time, power, Māori culture and tradition, semiotics and art history all play out across these five panels.The carved wooden figure shown in the first panel is Arnold Manaaki Wilson’s 1956 'He Tangata, He Tangata', Cotton’s homage to this pioneering Māori artist he respected greatly. The final panel of the work is titled Staging Post, and suggests a moment for taking account and preparing to set forth again. Here Cotton acknowledges two contemporary Māori artists, both of whom feature in Te Wheke – Peter Robinson (the chain) and Michael Parekowhai (the doe).
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

John Gully Lake Wakatipu
In 1877, John Gully retired from his role as chief draughtsman in the Nelson Survey Office and took a month-long sketching tour of Wanaka, Milford Sound, Wakatipu and Manapouri. A year later, when he exhibited his new watercolours, he was commended by the Nelson Evening Mail for “two large watercolour paintings, the latest, and, to our mind, the best of the many that have been produced from the studio of that now celebrated artist... These represented Milford Sound and Lake Wakatipu… two nobler pictures it would be difficult to find.”
(Our Collection: 19th and 20th Century New Zealand Art, 2018)
Commentary

The wisdom of crowds
In recent years, crowdfunding and crowdsourcing have become big news in the arts. By providing a funding model that enables would-be-investors to become involved in the production of new works, they have altered traditional models of patronage. Musicians, designers, dancers and visual artists are inviting the public to finance their projects via the internet. The public are also being asked to provide wealth in the form of cultural capital through crowdsourcing projects. The Gallery has been involved in two online crowdfunding ventures – a project with a public art focus around our 10th birthday celebrations, and the purchase of a major sculpture for the city. But, although these projects have been made possible by the internet, the concept behind the funding model is certainly not new. The rise of online crowdfunding platforms also raises important questions about the role of the state in the funding and generation of artwork, and the democratisation of tastemaking. How are models of supply and demand affected? Does the freedom from more traditional funding models allow greater innovation? Do 'serious' artists even ask for money? It's a big topic, and one that is undoubtedly shaping up in PhD theses around the world already. Bulletin asked a few commentators for their thoughts on the matter.
Notes

Still life with flowers in a basket by Pieter Hardimé
This article first appeared as 'Allegory of life's beauty, brevity and fragility' in The Press on 15 August 2014.
Collection

Elizabeth Kelly Laura
Elizabeth Kelly (née Abbott) made this sculptural portrait bust while at the Canterbury College School of Art, where she studied from 1891–1901. She won regular prizes for her modelling from life, including at the 1906–07 Christchurch International Exhibition. Kelly later became one of New Zealand’s leading society portrait painters, in the 1930s showing her work in exhibitions in London, Edinburgh and Paris.
Laura was modelled on the artist’s younger sister, Laura Maude Cox (née Abbott, 1884–1957). One of the earliest sculptures in the collection by a New Zealand born artist, it is a recent gift to the city from Margaret Abbott, a great-niece of the two sisters.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Pip Culbert Pup Tent
In this deconstructed tent, Pip Culbert has removed everything except the seams. What’s left is like a line drawing, or a plan of a tent at one-to-one scale. Culbert’s work claims space, yet sits lightly on the wall – much as a tent sits lightly on the land while providing a temporary home for its inhabitants. Culbert was a British artist who often exhibited in Aotearoa New Zealand, regularly travelling to visit friends around the country. Her ‘ghost tent’ evokes a sense of movement through, and temporary encampment within, the local landscape.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Petrus van der Velden Mountain Stream, Otira Gorge
The Rotterdam-born Petrus van der Velden arrived in New Zealand in 1890. Following his first visit to Otira Gorge in January 1891, he became engrossed with this subject, and painted its powerful, surging torrents many times over the next two years.
This painting was purchased by Gilbert Anderson, a leader in New Zealand’s frozen meat industry, also involved with the Canterbury Society of Arts. Anderson sold it to the Society in 1912; it was purchased from them in 1996 through the Community Trust and Christchurch Art Gallery Trust.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Notes

Untitled by Meindert Hobbema
This article first appeared as 'Dutch treat' in The Press on 12 April 2013.
Collection

Pieter Hardimé Still Life with Flowers in a Basket
As well as being enjoyed for their superb decorative qualities, Dutch still life paintings were intended to be reminders of the beauty, brevity and fragility of life. An arrangement of tulips, anemone, nicotiana, jonquils, morning glory and oriental poppies, this work is attributed to the Antwerp-born Flemish painter Pieter Hardimé, who lived at The Hague from 1697.
The painting arrived from Windsor, England as an unexpected and welcome gift, shortly after the 2011 earthquakes. It was given in memory of Kathleen Muriel Whiteley (1904–1949), who had historical family ties to Christchurch, from the estate of her husband Albert, whom she married two years before her death in 1949.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Article

The East India Company man: Brigadier-General Alexander Walker
Getting to know people can take time. While preparing for a future exhibition of early portraits from the collection, I'm becoming acquainted with Alexander Walker, and finding him a rewarding subject. Painted in 1819 by the leading Scottish portraitist of his day, Sir Henry Raeburn, Walker's portrait is wrought with Raeburn's characteristic blend of painterly vigour and attentive care and conveys the impression of a well-captured likeness.
Collection

Michael Parekowhai Poorman, Beggarman, Thief (Poorman)
“The thing about identity – it’s much more complicated than just being Māori or just being this or just being that.” — Michael Parekowhai
The title of this work recalls the old children’s rhyme that lists tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. Chanted to suggest careers for boys, or who a girl might marry, the song removes all self-determination. The implication here is that for Māori the options are limited. Modelled on the artist’s father, Poorman’s suave appearance is undercut by the name badge reading “Hello my name is Hori” – a transliteration of George (Parekowhai’s father’s name), but also a common racist term for Māori. Parekowhai says, “I make objects that set a scene or present a stage on which other things can happen, on which the real art can take place.” Poorman operates on many levels – its visual appeal is quickly replaced by discomfort as we realise we might be looking at the subject of racism dressed up in a dinner suit.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Notes

Angels and Aristocrats
Blair Jackson and I attended the opening of Angels & Aristocrats at Dunedin Public Art Gallery on Friday 27 April. It's spectacular.
Notes

Taking Stock
It's hard to believe, but only eighteen collection works were damaged as a result of all earthquakes, with fourteen damaged on the 22 February 2011.
Collection
Fiona Pardington Portrait of a Life-cast, possibly of ‘Taha-tahala’ [possibly Takatahara], Aotearoa New Zealand
Across her career, Fiona Pardington has a history of working with found objects. This portrait acts to reclaim an image believed to be of her ancestor, Takatahara from Te Pātaka o Rākaihautū / Banks Peninsula. The subject was introduced to the plaster-cast technique of naturalist and phrenologist Pierre Marie Alexandre Dumoutier at Ōtakou during one of his visits to Aotearoa in the early 1800s. Often mistaken for death masks, life-casts were in fact made with the subject’s participation. Takatahara was known as a robust toa (warrior) who fought in, and lived well past, the battle with Te Rauparaha at Ōnawe pā (fortified village).
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Frances Hodgkins Pleasure Garden
This work was painted during a sketching trip to Bridgnorth, Shropshire in the summer of 1932. Its lively watercolour style and subject matter express Hodgkins’s characteristic interest in capturing the fleeting sensations of a moment.
Following her death in England, Pleasure Garden was one of six works by Hodgkins brought to Christchurch in 1948 at the request of the Canterbury Society of Arts. When the Society’s purchasing committee rejected the selection, a group of independent art supporters raised the purchase price and offered it to the city’s gallery, whose refusal generated metres of newspaper column displeasure and debate. In 1951 their persistence finally paid off.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

George Sheridan Knowles Glasgerion
The Manchester-born painter and illustrator George Sheridan Knowles specialised in romantic history pieces and genre scenes. This work – exhibited at the Royal Academy, London in 1897 – was based on a tragic medieval ballad, in which Glasgerion, a king ’s son, has cast his troubadour spell over the court of the King of Normandy, in pursuit of his fair daughter. The story doesn’t end well.
This was one of six paintings imported from England to Christchurch by the Canterbury Society of Arts in 1903 for consideration to purchase; its acquisition was generously funded by the businessman and politician John T. Peacock (1827–1905). Glasgerion was presented to the city’s new gallery in 1932.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

George Leslie In the Wizard’s Garden
Narrative paintings such as In the Wizard’s Garden were extremely popular with Victorian audiences. Loaded with symbolism that referred to the notion of the fallen woman, the artist provided visual pointers to be unpicked and read by the audience. These include the hitched-up scarlet dress, the fallen leaves in the foreground and the shears which, shown with the blades open, suggest a loss of virtue. Contrasted with the innocence of the young woman, the presence of the silhouetted figure entering the garden adds a sinister element. The stream separating the two figures symbolises a barrier between them – her virtue hangs in the balance. Will she remain pure or will she, through the act of crossing the water, succumb to wantonness? George Dunlop Leslie was a successful, prolific artist who exhibited annually at the Royal Academy from 1859; usually theatrical, symbol-laden paintings of young women from a previous age.
(New Dawn Fades, November 2018)
Collection

Colin S. Lovell-Smith The Destruction Of O-tu-matu Goose Bay
With the arrival of the motorcar, Otama-a-kura / Goose Bay (south of Kaikōura) became a popular camping spot for summer visitors. Christchurch-born couple Colin and Rata Lovell-Smith stayed there regularly throughout the 1930s, joining the throng heading north each season to camp, fish and relax – and, for these two, to paint. The results of Colin’s labours include a pared back evening coastal scene at Haumuri Point; and this painterly record of civil engineering works disturbing the usually tranquil Otumatu (near Goose Bay) during the completion of the Main Trunk Line in 1939.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Raymond McIntyre Study (Woman in a Wide Black Hat)
Based on a London stage actor and dancer who became his favourite model from 1912 to 1914, Raymond McIntyre’s Study (Woman in a Wide Black Hat) represents several sources of inspiration, with a strong dose of idealisation and invention. “The girl who is sitting for me a now lot – Sylvia Constance Cavendish”, as he wrote to his father in New Zealand in 1913, “has a very refined interesting pale face – and I have done some very good work from her – paintings and drawings. And she is so conscientious and sits so well – she is quite a find.”Christchurch-born McIntyre had studied at Canterbury College School of Art and taken private lessons with Petrus van der Velden in the 1890s. In 1909 he moved to London, where he soon built a reputation with his small, pared-back landscapes and studies of female heads, painted in an elegant, simplified Japanese woodblock inspired style. Aligned to the mood he sought, he also took cues from particular European Renaissance masters – as mentioned in another letter: “I admire Botticelli and Holbein so, there is in their work such an aloofness.”
(Persistent Encounters, March 2020)
Collection

Gaspar van Wittel The Colosseum seen from the Southeast
Gaspar van Wittel is also known by the italianised version of his name, Vanvitelli
Dutch-born Gaspar van Wittel reached Rome aged about twenty-two in 1674, becoming part of a high-spirited, long-established group of expatriate Dutch painters known as the Bentvueghels (Dutch for ‘birds of a feather’). He married Anna Lorenzani of Rome (their eldest son was the leading eighteenth-century Italian architect Luigi Vanvitelli) and spent the rest of his life in Italy. Van Wittel played a pivotal role in the development of the genre of topographical painting known as veduta, and was an important influence on later artists such as Canaletto (1697–1768). Van Wittel’s paintings typically became treasured souvenirs for those on the high culture rite of passage known as the Grand Tour. Three other versions of this view are known, at different sizes and with different arrangements of figures, livestock and lighting. These are based on a gridded pencil, ink and watercolour sketch dated 1685 and held at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma.
(The Weight of Sunlight, 16 September 2017 - 16 September 2018)
Collection

Henriette Browne La Lecture de la Bible
The French artist Henriette Browne excelled at painting highly realist, representational narrative paintings and La Lecture de la Bible is one of her finest. Browne produced several portraits of religious devotees and the two young women in this painting are thought to be novices studying to enter a religious order. They are clearly virtuous – their austere black garments suggest a puritan character and the painting is also known as The Puritans. The withered flowers on the table are the most obvious narrative element in the painting, these are a vanitas symbol for the passing of time and the loss of youth. La Lecture de la Bible was first owned by Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoléon III, and was presented to the Gallery by its major benefactor, Robert McDougall.
(New Dawn Fades, November 2018)
First exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1857 with the title 'Les Puritaines', this painting has for many years also been known as 'La Lecture de la Bible'.
Collection

Gottfried Lindauer King Tāwhiao Tūkāroto Matutaera Pōtatau Te Wherowhero (Ngāti Mahuta, Tainui)
“Ki te kotahi te kākaho ka whati, ki te kāpuia, e kore e whati.” —King Tāwhiao [If there is but one toetoe stem it will break, but if they are together in a bundle they will never break.] While in Sydney in 1884, en route to England, King Tāwhiao had his photograph taken by Henry King. Vienna-trained, Bohemia-born painter Gottfried Lindauer obtained a copy in Aotearoa New Zealand and that became the source for this portrait.Tāwhiao’s kaupapa (intention) was to meet Queen Victoria, gain recognition of the Treaty of Waitangi, and redress the injustice of vast confiscations of Māori land – he was blocked, however, from seeing her.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Raymond McIntyre Ruth
Arriving in London in 1909, the Christchurch-born and trained Raymond McIntyre soon gained a reputation there for his small, pared-back landscapes and studies of female heads, painted in an elegant, simplified, Japanese woodblock inspired style. This painting was modelled on an actor and dancer who became his principal muse from 1912, sometimes mentioned in his letters home: “The girl who is sitting for me a lot now, Sylvia Constance Cavendish… has a very refined interesting pale face… I have done some very good work from her… she is quite a find.”
McIntyre died in London in 1933. Seven of his works were given by his family between 1938 and 1991.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Harry Linley Richardson Cynthia’s Birthday
Harry Linley Richardson began painting Cynthia’s Birthday in Karori, Wellington in December 1926. When purchased for Christchurch’s intended new art gallery in 1928, it attracted much criticism, largely for the children’s doll-like immobility. “Where is the joyful spirit of a birthday party? Why, such dolefulness?” wrote “Disgusted Ratepayer” to the Press, also discerning “no concentration on the matter at hand, namely, the lighting of the candle.”While others defended the selection, the painter himself had no comeback. London-born Richardson had arrived in New Zealand to teach at Wellington Technical College in 1908, and was a painter with a background in illustration and design, influences both evident in this work. Looking back rather than forward, he also admired the work of mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painters such as John Everett Millais, whose devotion to realism with decorative effect and melancholic tone Cynthia’s Birthday certainly suggests.The work’s solemnity also makes it difficult perhaps not to consider the demands made on sitters, even the most pliable – these were the artist’s children – and the inherent tensions of artist-model relationships.
(Persistent encounters, March 2020)
Collection

Buck Nin The Mamakus
For the exhibition Untitled #1050 (25 November 2017 – 14 October 2018) this work was displayed with the following label:
“Land is essential to the Māori people because it’s been used by the ancestors for centuries. I believe that during that time, of centuries past, there has been a spiritual content left in the land. This spiritual content infuses and gives soul to the land and in turn the land gives it back to us and humanises our soul because of our ancestors.”
In this painting Nin’s inspiration is the Mamaku Range lying just West of Rotorua. Landforms have been simplified while an abstract pattern based on the traditional prow and stern carvings of the famous 200 year old Māori war canoe, Te Winika, has been overlaid.
Nin said, “I’ve taken that whole aspect of the canoe prow and the stern post and looked at it and planted it on my painting so that you look through the lattice-work, as it were, into the land, through into the soul of the land.”
Studying art at Ilam Art School here in Christchurch during the 1960s, Nin emerged as a modernist painter interested in abstraction which he combined with Māori culture. His time at Ilam “opened the door for me to bridge the gap between the Pākehā world […] and the Māori world. My paintings are a synthesis of the bi-cultural situation that we have here in New Zealand.”
—Buck Nin, 1981
Collection

Gertrude Hammond A Reading from Plato
Gertrude Demain Hammond was a prolific London illustrator who was also active in exhibiting her watercolours. A Reading from Plato was shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1903 before coming to Christchurch for the 1906–07 New Zealand International Exhibition. There it was purchased by the avid local art collector James Jamieson, who with his brother William, ran one of the city’s largest construction companies.
Following his death in 1927, James’s family presented many works of art from his collection to become part of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery’s founding collection, which at its opening in 1932 consisted of 160 paintings and sculptures.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Artist Unknown Nathaniel Webb, Esq., of Roundhill Grange, Charlton Musgrove, Somerset
Nathaniel Webb, the subject of this striking 300-year-old portrait, was a Bristol merchant who – like many of his peers in this period – is known to have made a vast fortune through West Indies sugar and slavery.
Webb’s portrait was donated in 2007 by a direct descendant, in honour of her father John Jekyll Cuddon, a respected Christchurch chartered accountant. The painting came to New Zealand with Henry Joseph C. Jekyll, who immigrated to Canterbury in 1862, and in 1880 purchased a large parcel of farmland beyond the edges of Christchurch, naming it Dallington after an old family estate.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection
Peter Robinson Mission Statement: First we take Island Bay then we take Berlin
Mission Statement was painted in a friend’s studio in Ōtautahi / Christchurch at a time when Peter Robinson was regularly travelling back and forth between Aotearoa New Zealand and Germany. Riffing off Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, he outlined a plan for geopolitical success as a contemporary artist: a campaign first to be waged in a suburb of Wellington, then in Berlin. When he first started exhibiting in Germany, he found that his work was in danger of being misread – or exoticised – because of its New Zealand cultural references. He made his own ambition to succeed in Europe the supposed focus of a body of work, casting himself as an enterprising tourist with a plan for world domination. Although it seems humorous, the real subject is cultural alienation and the difficulty of communication between people with different cultures and languages.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Olivia Spencer Bower Hokianga
In 1948, Olivia Spencer Bower spent several months at Rawene in the Hokianga Harbour recovering from suspected rheumatic fever, and was reinvigorated by the setting: “I was excited by the spirit of the old fortified hills, the mixture of the old Maori culture with the new, the mangrove swamps, the remoteness of the place and the speedy accessibility to them by launch.” She painted at least five variations of this work.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Matthijs Naiveu Scene in a Tavern
Matthijs Naiveu studied under the leading seventeenth century Dutch painter Gerrit Dou (painter of The Physician). Naiveu’s tavern scene presents a moral lesson: the child implores his mother and a man who may be his father to put their intoxication aside, and give him a better chance in life.
This is one of many works presented to the Gallery by the Canterbury Society of Arts in 1932. It was bequeathed to the society by Scottish-born Major Archibald C. D. Spencer (1861–1929). Major Spencer retired from service with the Royal Irish Rifles in South Africa, Canada and Malta and settled at Mount Peel in South Canterbury.
Collection

Margaret Stoddart Diamond Harbour
Margaret Stoddart was born in Te Waipapa / Diamond Harbour. Her father gave the harbour its English name after its sparkling waters, and commissioned the jetty’s construction in about 1857. Stoddart spent nine years in Europe studying, painting and exhibiting. When she returned home in 1906 she brought with her a skilful impressionist approach to her work. Stoddart was a prolific watercolourist who favoured coastal locations. At her first solo exhibition at the Canterbury Society of Arts in 1911, most of the fifty works shown had been painted near her family’s home at Diamond Harbour. However, as a reviewer for the Lyttelton Times noted, “New Brighton has received a share of attention, and perhaps it is shown at its best during a storm, gusts of wind howling across the Estuary, bending the tussock and grass on the beach.”
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Thomas Benjamin Kennington Relaxation
Thomas Benjamin Kennington’s focus as an artist was in the sympathetic depiction of the everyday reality of the poor and working classes. Born in Grimsby, a seaport on England's east coast, he studied art in Liverpool, London and Paris, and from 1880 exhibited annually at the Royal Academy, where this naturalistic workroom scene was shown in 1908.
Relaxation was exhibited at the 1911 International Exposition of Art in Rome and at the 1913 New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts exhibiton in Wellington. By 1920 it was in the hands of newspaper proprietor Robert Bell. Bell was president of the Canterbury Society of Arts from 1925–26, and bequeathed ten paintings to the gallery. (Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Lord Frederic Leighton Teresina
The name Teresina appears in a crowded notebook list of models sketched by Frederic Leighton during his 1874 stay in Rome, to where he habitually relocated from London each autumn. Leighton was president of the Royal Academy at that time, and Teresina was one of four works he included in the big summer show of 1876.Like McIntyre’s elegant portrait study, it seems a representation of an impossible ideal, with the similar influence of early sixteenth century Renaissance portraiture. The enigmatic Teresina might almost be Leighton’s updated Mona Lisa; he is known to have studied and sketched da Vinci’s (then surprisingly little-known) portrait at the Louvre in Paris in 1856.
(Persistent encounters)
Collection
![Ana Reupene Whetuki and Child (Ngāti Maru) [also known as Heeni Hirini and Heeni Phillips]](/media/cache/52/f0/52f003edf705f213f5aee47dfc533526.jpg)
Gottfried Lindauer Ana Reupene Whetuki and Child (Ngāti Maru) [also known as Heeni Hirini and Heeni Phillips]
Ana Reupene Whetuki from the Ngāti Maru iwi (tribe) was well-known in the Thames goldfield district in the Coromandel. Also known as Heeni Hirini and Heeni Phillips, she married the Ngāti Maru rangatira (chief) Reupene Whetuki and lived at Manaia, where some of her descendants still live today.Gottfried Lindauer based this portrait on a striking 1870s photographic studio portrait by the Foy Brothers of Thames. Lindauer first visited Thames in 1874, shortly after arriving in Aotearoa New Zealand from Bohemia (present day Czech Republic). He painted at least twelve versions of this portrait between 1878 and 1920.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Gerrit Dou The Physician
Gerrit Dou was Rembrandt van Rijn’s first student, training with him in Leiden while in his teens, and for a significant period he eclipsed his master’s reputation. Rich with coded narratives, his extraordinarily detailed paintings were prized throughout Europe by the wealthiest royal and aristocratic collectors. The figure examining the bottle of liquid in this painting is believed to be a self-portrait, and is identified as a piskijker– a medical practitioner skilled at studying urine, here for a pregnancy test. Symbols of his skill and learning are prominent, including a celestial globe and carefully positioned anatomy textbook. The skeleton on the open page leaning like a gravedigger on his spade is the ultimate symbol of vanitas – a reminder of the fragile brevity of a human life. At the same time it looks with anticipation to a child to come.
(Persistent Encounters, March 2020)
Collection

William Powell Frith Girl with a Mask
Although apparently portraying a refined Venetian lady – a young woman with carnival mask, black veil and shawl – this work was painted not in Italy, but England. Yorkshire-born William Frith, who became extremely well-known for his large, densely populated panoramas of contemporary English life, also painted small costume studies early in his career, often modelled on literary figures. Frith’s model in this work, painted in 1846, strongly resembles his wife Isabelle (née Baker), whom he married in York in June 1845; Isabelle sat for him several times. Isabelle Frith became a close friend and confidante of Catherine Dickens, wife of author Charles, who (although a friend of her husband’s) she later banned from entering their London home; this following the 1858 breakup of the Dickens’ marriage. The Frith marriage was also ‘troubled’: Isabelle had 12 children to William from 1846–60; his mistress Mary Alford had six more to him from 1855. (He married Mary in 1881, a year after the death of Isabelle.)
(The Weight of Sunlight, 16 September 2017 - 16 September 2018)
Collection
![Rakapa, an Arawa Chieftainess: Rakapa Te Tira (Ngāti Te Takinga, Ngāti Pikiao, Te Arawa) [also known as Rakapa Manawa/Ngatatau/Rapana/Mitai]](/media/cache/9f/ab/9fab3d2b141525cfd9f2b0bfb332ceb7.jpg)
Charles Frederick Goldie Rakapa, an Arawa Chieftainess: Rakapa Te Tira (Ngāti Te Takinga, Ngāti Pikiao, Te Arawa) [also known as Rakapa Manawa/Ngatatau/Rapana/Mitai]
Rakapa Te Tira (also known as Rakapa Manawa/Ngatatau/Rapana/Mitai) was a rangatira (chief) of Te Arawa who lived at Te Takinga marae at Mourea, on the eastern shores of Lake Rotorua. Charles Goldie painted Rakapa’s portrait at least six times between 1910 and 1918.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

George Henry The Black Hat
In about 1901, having established a strong reputation with his painting in Scotland, the Glasgow-based George Henry relocated to London, where he began to establish a successful society portrait practice.
The Black Hat – possibly the work exhibited to acclaim as ‘La dame au chapeau noir’ at the Royal Glasgow Institute in 1904 – was one of twelve paintings selected in 1911 by the English artist Niels Lund to be purchased for the Canterbury Society of Arts. Its acquisition in 1912 was enabled through a newly agreed £50 annual subsidy from the Christchurch City Council; the society presented the painting to the city's new public gallery in 1932.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Meindert Hobbema A Wooded Landscape with Peasants on a Path and an Angler at a Stream
At around the age of seventeen, the orphaned Meindert Hobbema met Jacob van Ruisdael, an artist considered the pre-eminent landscape painter of the Dutch Golden Age, who would teach him how to become an artist. Painted around ten years later, A Wooded Landscape with Peasants on a Path and an Angler at a Stream shows Hobbema proceeding on his own merit and demonstrating his own style. The lowered horizon line creates a big sky, which is animated by rolling clouds in silvery blues, greys and bright whites. Their forms are continued in the treetops and knotted branches that frame and obscure the scene, which recedes almost endlessly into the distance, to reveal fields flooded by sunlight and the understated silhouette of a church.
(Endless Light, 29 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)
Collection

Frances Hodgkins Unshatterable (Belgian Refugees)
The Dunedin-born Frances Hodgkins was running her own watercolour painting school in Paris when World War I broke out in 1914. She relocated to St. Ives in Cornwall, where she found many displaced Belgian families also living, and painted this work in response to their wretched plight. Unshatterable, one of her first oil paintings, was exhibited in London in 1916 and purchased by the painter Sir Cedric Morris. Dr Rodney Wilson, the Gallery’s director in 1980, visited Morris, and with assistance from the National Art Collections Fund, a British art charity, successfully secured this work for the Christchurch collection.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Jacopo Amigoni Bacchus and Ariadne
Born in 1695 in Naples or Venice, Jacopo Amigoni worked in Munich from 1719 as a painter at the court of Maximilian II Emanuel, before moving to London to paint for King George II in 1729. A pioneer of the Venetian Rococo style, Amigoni painted this sumptuous mythological scene during his stay in London. It pictures Bacchus, Roman god of wine, leaning in a drunken stupor against Ariadne, the Cretan princess who became his immortal bride, who is warning the putti not to waken him. Amigoni returned to Venice in 1739 after making what was considered a fortune through his painting in London, and spent his later years from 1747 in the court of King Ferdinand VI in Madrid. Patronage for artists such as Amigoni linked to the taste for Italian decorative art and high culture that was prevalent among Europe’s elite.
(Persistent Encounters, March 2020)
Collection

Sir Henry Raeburn Mrs Barbara Walker of Bowland
The 55-year-old Alexander Walker (1764–1831) and his wife Barbara (née Montgomery, 1770–1831) commissioned Scotland’s leading portraitist, Henry Raeburn, to paint their portraits in 1819. They had married eight years earlier; shortly after Alexander’s retirement from over thirty years’ service with the East India Company – mostly in India – and had two young sons. Alexander had one final Company role before him, that of Governor of St. Helena from 1823–28.
Two of their grandsons, William Campbell Walker and Alexander John Walker, immigrated to New Zealand in 1862 to farm in Canterbury; William later became Minister of Education. These impressive ancestral portraits were presented by descendants in 1984.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

U Biagini Dante’s Beatrice
Previously attributed to the Rome-based sculptor Alfredo Biagini, Dante’s Beatrice is now recognised as the work of a lesser-known but nevertheless highly accomplished artist U. Biagini working in Florence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Representing Beatrice, who captured the heart of the thirteenth-century Italian poet Dante Alighieri, it is a fine example of the Florentine sculptor’s idealised marble busts.
Dante’s Beatrice was given to the city through the bequest of the retired Christchurch merchant and importer John Alexander Redpath (1875–1975).
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Auguste Rodin Psyche
Psyche, in Greek mythology, was a mortal princess whose beauty attracted the attention of Eros, the god of love, and the jealous anger of his mother Aphrodite. The renowned Parisian sculptor Auguste Rodin worked on variations on the theme of Psyche between 1886 and 1905. This bronze is a later casting, produced by the Musée Rodin at a foundry in Paris in 1961.
Psyche was purchased by the New Zealand Government in 1962 through a fund established to strengthen learning and cultural relations between New Zealand and France. After being exhibited in Christchurch in 1963, this city became the sculpture’s permanent home.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Jan Frans van Son Flowers in a vase
The Flemish artist Jan Frans van Son came from an artistic family; his father, Joris van Son, was also a respected painter. During the sixteenth century the demand for artists to paint flower subjects – particularly rare and exotic blooms – mirrored the increased enthusiasm for the cultivation of flowers in Holland. By the seventeenth century, still-life flower painting had become a major genre in Dutch painting, and it was at this that van Son excelled. He relocated to England as a young man around 1675 where he established himself as a highly successful painter renowned for his flower paintings.
(New Dawn Fades, November 2018)
Collection

Michael Parekowhai Kiss The Baby Good-Bye (the maquette)
Appropriation—specifically, the use of indigenous cultural material by non-indigenous artists—was one of the critical issues of 1990s art in New Zealand, mirroring the other arguments about Māori land and property rights that were being waged in wider society. Michael Parekowhai’s monumental work Kiss the Baby Goodbye made a major contribution to that heated debate, when he reworked Gordon Walters’ painting Kahukura, completed in 1968—the year of Parekowhai’s own birth—as a sculpture in three dimensions, a giant kitset model ready to be snapped out and made up.
In the late 1980s and early 90s, Walters had been both vigorously attacked and fiercely defended for his earlier use of the pītau (fern frond) design taken from kōwhaiwhai panels in wharenui. Parekowhai’s Kiss the Baby Goodbye was an adaptation of Walters’ painting that both acknowledged the older artist’s work and asserted Māori ownership of its significant forms. It also brought the pītau design back from two dimensions into architectural space.
Christchurch Art Gallery’s work is a smaller version of Parekowhai’s original, made for his first major solo exhibition in 1994. Both sculptures share something not included in Walters’ painting: a final circle at the bottom right corner, which appears like a full stop. Parekowhai, it seemed, would have the last word.
(Your Hotel Brain 13 May 2017 - 8 July 2018)
Collection

Joost Cornelisz Droochsloot Soldiers in a Village
Between 1618 and 1648, Europe was thrown into turmoil by the Thirty Years’ War – a bitter conflict that raged between Catholic and Protestant states. It was renowned for the vicious fighting often brought about by the large mercenary armies employed on both sides. Here, Droochsloot depicts the confiscations and pillaging by mercenary soldiers as they drive Dutch villagers from their homes.
(New Dawn Fades, November 2018)
Collection

Alfred Drury The Age of innocence
Modelled by Alfred Drury after a friend’s daughter in fancy dress, this wistful bronze bust is one of many variations of The Age of Innocence he made between 1897 and 1918; some in white marble. It is regarded as an important work in the British New Sculpture movement, whose followers sought either greater naturalism or symbolic qualities than had been found in the prevailing neoclassical approach.
Brought from England to Christchurch for the 1906–07 New Zealand International Exhibition, it was purchased by the Canterbury Society of Arts, and presented to the city in 1932 to become part of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery’s founding collection.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Sir Henry Raeburn Brigadier-General Alexander Walker of Bowland
The 55-year-old Alexander Walker (1764–1831) and his wife Barbara (née Montgomery, 1770–1831) commissioned Scotland’s leading portraitist, Henry Raeburn, to paint their portraits in 1819. They had married eight years earlier; shortly after Alexander’s retirement from over thirty years’ service with the East India Company – mostly in India – and had two young sons. Alexander had one final Company role before him, that of Governor of St. Helena from 1823–28.
Two of their grandsons, William Campbell Walker and Alexander John Walker, immigrated to New Zealand in 1862 to farm in Canterbury; William later became Minister of Education. These impressive ancestral portraits were presented by descendants in 1984.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Olivia Spencer Bower Harbour, Akaroa
Olivia Spencer Bower was often drawn to coastal settings, and painted this lively composition at a moment when she was responding with fresh eyes to the Aotearoa New Zealand landscape.After two and a half years’ study and painting in England and Europe, returning at the end of 1931, she had successfully exhibited her European work. Turning now to the local environment, newspaper reviews at the time show she was soon noticed as “one of the younger generation […] whose art shows every possibility of developing into something distinctively New Zealand in character”; and for the “brilliance and verve and a feeling of assured spontaneity” of her work.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Collection

Lonnie Hutchinson Sista7
From her studio window in the port town of Ōhinehou / Lyttelton, Lonnie Hutchinson could see the volcanic range commonly known as the Seven Sisters running along the back of Ōhinetahi / Governors Bay. A pivotal work in the artist’s career, Sista7 celebrates this evening vista and the sense of belonging she felt nestled in the rohe (territory) of Ngāti Wheke, the hapū (subtribe) based at nearby Rāpaki. The spiritual and cultural values of Hutchinson’s dual Samoan and Ngāi Tahu heritage are firmly embedded in her practice. Hand-cut in black builder’s paper, positive and negative elements recall the fundamentals of Polynesian and Māori design. The rhythm of folds and the elegant shadows cast by the motifs inspire a natural sense of wonder.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
The dimensions given here are for one of this work's seven individual parts. The spacing between each part, and thus the width of the entire work, can vary. In this image from the exhibition Te Puāwai o Ngāi Tahu (10 May – 24 August 2003), the parts are installed 300mm apart.
Collection

Gerrit Adriaenszoon Berckheyde A View in Cologne with St. Gereon's Basilica
Gerrit Berckheyde’s contribution to the Dutch Golden Age of painting was as an exponent of the cityscape, which became a new genre from the mid seventeenth-century. Berckheyde was Haarlem-based, and began producing paintings of Cologne in about 1670, from sketches made in the 1650s. He painted a series of works depicting St. Gereon’s Basilica, a large and distinctive Romanesque style church completed in the thirteenth century.
This painting was purchased through a significant bequest made in 1953 from an insurance settlement from the estate of William Ballantyne (1864–1934), whose art collection had been largely destroyed in the 1947 Ballantyne’s department store fire.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Henri Fantin-Latour Panier de Raisins
Henri Fantin-Latour’s Panier de Raisins evokes the abundance of midsummer and an atmosphere of unhurried pleasure and respite. Every June from 1878 onwards, once the clamour of the Paris Salon had subsided, Fantin-Latour and his wife Victoria (née Dubourg) closed their city apartment and headed to rural France, and a small country house in Lower Normandy, to paint until summer’s end. Henri Fantin-Latour sent the best of his new still-life paintings to his dealer in London, where they found a ready audience.Fantin-Latour produced over 800 fruit and flower paintings between 1862 and 1896, nearly all of which sold in England – the paintings for which he is most highly regarded were unknown to his countrymen. As the painter Jacques-Émile Blanche protested in 1919, “For too long, they were not found in France; Fantin was revealed to us only through rare portraits and fantasies.”
(Persistent encounters, March 2020)
Collection

Raymond McIntyre Suzette
Arriving in London in 1909, the Christchurch-born and trained Raymond McIntyre soon gained a reputation there for his small, pared-back landscapes and studies of female heads, painted in an elegant, simplified, Japanese woodblock inspired style. These three paintings were modelled on an actor and dancer who became his principal muse from 1912, sometimes mentioned in his letters home: “The girl who is sitting for me a lot now, Sylvia Constance Cavendish… has a very refined interesting pale face… I have done some very good work from her… she is quite a find.”
McIntyre died in London in 1933. Seven of his works were given by his family between 1938 and 1991.
(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)
Collection

Richard Aldworth Oliver The Māori Settlement, Purau Bay, Port Cooper
Richard Aldworth Oliver was commander of the British Navy’s HMS Fly in Aotearoa New Zealand in the service of Governor George Grey. Stationed here from 1847 until 1851, his duties included conveying Grey and his officers on missions to Māori settlements. He also made watercolour records of the places and people visited.In June 1848, aboard the Fly, Oliver was a witness to the signing of the shameful Kemp’s Deed, or Canterbury Purchase, which saw the iwi (tribe) Ngāi Tahu forced to accept two thousand pounds in exchange for nearly five and a half million hectares of land, leaving the iwi with a little over two and a half thousand hectares – less than 0.05 per cent. In December 1850, not far from the pictured settlement at Purau in Te Whakaraupō / Lyttelton Harbour, Oliver oversaw the arrival of the first Canterbury Association colonists.
(Te Wheke, 2020)
Notes

Belgian Refugees by Frances Hodgkins
This article first appeared in The Press on 28 February 2007
Belgian Refugees is one of the first oil paintings that Frances Hodgkins ever exhibited, although at the time she was already well accustomed to showing her watercolours. Working in oils and tempera on canvas, she used an experimental technique in this work that gained much from her experience with watercolour. Believed to have been first shown as Unshatterable, in October 1916 at the International Society's Autumn Exhibition in London, the choice of title would suggest a greater sense of resilience than is actually conveyed by this family group. Here only the baby is oblivious to trouble, while his nursing mother seems devoid of expression, and the older children tense with anxiety or fear. Behind the group, a gap in the swirling grey suggests the fact of a missing father, and this steam and smoke speaks of displacement, the atmospheric backdrop of a train station or the symbolic clouds of war. Within the wall of monochrome, intense colour is reserved for mother and child, who also remind of one of Hodgkins' favourite early choices of subject matter in watercolour.