Charles Meryon
France, b.1821, d.1868
Nouvelle-Zélande, Presqu’île de Banks. Etat de la petite colonie Française d’Akaroa. Vers 1845 - Voyage du Rhin.
New Zealand - The Little French Colony Of Akaroa Etat De La Petite Colonie Française D’Akaroa, 1845
- 1865
- Engraving
- Purchased with assistance from the Olive Stirrat Bequest, 1989
- 264 x 362mm
- 86/25
- View on google maps
Tags: animals, birds (animals), buildings (structures), clouds, harbors, hills, landscapes (representations), monochrome, natural landscapes, plants (living organisms), seas, smoke (material)
Described as the father of modern etching, French naval officer Charles Meryon was one of the most important artists to work in Waitaha / Canterbury during the colonial era. He served on the Rhin, stationed at Akaroa between 1843 and 1846, to look out for the French settlement there. Meryon made numerous pencil studies at Akaroa which he later used as the basis for this series of etchings completed back in Paris during the 1860s. He planned to publish these and other images of the Pacific in an album, which unfortunately he never completed. The story of the French attempt to settle Te Waipounamu / the South Island is a fascinating chapter in New Zealand’s history. A French whaling captain, Jean Langlois, purchased 30,000 acres from Kāi Tahu on Horomaka / Banks Peninsula in 1838 and returned to France to get government support to establish a French colony at Akaroa. It was from here that he hoped the French would be able to expand throughout the rest of the South Island. A company was formed and sixty- three French and German settlers set sail on the Comte de Paris. They arrived at Akaroa in August 1840 only to find a Union Jack flying at Takapūneke / Green’s Point signalling that British sovereignty had already been claimed. Today, Akaroa continues to retain something of a French flavour.
(Pickaxes and shovels, 17 February – 5 August 2018)
Exhibition History
Believing he had purchased Banks Peninsula from Ngāi Tahu in 1838, the French whaler Jean-François Langlois spearheaded an effort to annex the South Island to France. Operating with the Compagnie Nanto-Bordelaise, the first intended emigrants left France in March 1840 on the Compte de Paris under Captain Langlois’ command. A month earlier, however, the Treaty of Waitangi had been signed between Māori and the British Crown and the prospective French settlers found themselves arriving in Akaroa in August 1840 to a British colony.
Langlois’ claim was not immediately dismissed; between 1843 and 1846 the French naval corvette Le Rhin was stationed at Akaroa to strengthen and protect French rights. Onboard was the youthful cadet Charles Meryon, who applied his early art training to sketching the area. Meryon pursued an art career on returning to France in 1846. Later he revisited his time in New Zealand through a series of idyllic scenic etchings. (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
Between 1843 and 1846 Charles Meryon was based at Akaroa with the French naval corvette, Le Rhin, which had been assigned to protect the interests of the French settlement there. This view, looking north, captures an important early view of Akaroa, one of the first colonial settlements in the South Island. This etching comes from a group of five plates relating to Akaroa that Meryon produced for his Album of Souvenirs du Voyage du Rhin, which he began in 1860, using his sketches from the 1840s. Born in Paris, Meryon had studied painting after he finished his naval training and, on his return to France in 1846, he decided to become an artist. He studied under the French printmaker Eugène Bléry (1805-1887) and went on to become one of the most important French etchers of the 19th century. (Label date uknown)
Related reading: Ka Honoka
Notes
Happy Birthday Akaroa Museum
Big Congratulations to Akaroa Museum on their 50th anniversary which they are celebrating this weekend.
Article
A Tale of Two Chiefs
If you have recently visited He Taonga Rangatira: Noble Treasures at the Gallery you will have been struck by Fiona Pardington's two large photographic portraits of lifelike busts of Ngāi tahu tipuna (ancestors).
Collection
Louis Auguste de Sainson Nouvelle-Zélande
Louis Auguste de Sainson was the official artist aboard Captain Dumont d’Urville’s Astrolabe. He spent three months in New Zealand in 1827 on a maritime mapping survey between Tasman Bay and the Bay of Islands, followed by a month in Tonga. A substantial publication on d’Urville’s 1826–29 voyages through Asia and the Pacific was published in Paris in 1833, profusely illustrated by lithographic prints after de Sainson’s drawings.
D’Urville and his crew had close contact with people they met, including the Totaranui chief Tehinui (or Tehi-Noui) and his travelling companion Kokiore (or Koki-Hore) depicted in print 2, who were sketched by de Sainson after coming aboard at Palliser Bay (near present-day Wellington). Tehinui and Kokiore at first both intended to reach Europe, but instead disembarked at Tolaga Bay, later finding their own way home. In summarising his portrait sketching process, de Sainson later recalled: “What I was doing caused a lot of laughter; every minute they tried to escape me.” (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
Collection
![Nouvelle-Zélande - coffre en bois sculpté [Plate 59]](/media/cache/59/1b/591b8419cb48044519926cac449d6ac0.jpg)
Louis Auguste de Sainson Nouvelle-Zélande - coffre en bois sculpté [Plate 59]
Louis Auguste de Sainson was the official artist aboard Captain Dumont d’Urville’s Astrolabe. He spent three months in New Zealand in 1827 on a maritime mapping survey between Tasman Bay and the Bay of Islands, followed by a month in Tonga. A substantial publication on d’Urville’s 1826–29 voyages through Asia and the Pacific was published in Paris in 1833, profusely illustrated by lithographic prints after de Sainson’s drawings.
D’Urville and his crew had close contact with people they met, including the Totaranui chief Tehinui (or Tehi-Noui) and his travelling companion Kokiore (or Koki-Hore) depicted in print 2, who were sketched by de Sainson after coming aboard at Palliser Bay (near present-day Wellington). Tehinui and Kokiore at first both intended to reach Europe, but instead disembarked at Tolaga Bay, later finding their own way home. In summarising his portrait sketching process, de Sainson later recalled: “What I was doing caused a lot of laughter; every minute they tried to escape me.” (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
Collection
François-Edmond Pâris, Pierre Langlumé, Jean-Antoine Laurent, Joseph Tastu Nouvelle Zélande. Pirogue de L'Anse de l'Astrolabe. (Baie Tasman.), Pirogue du Canal de l'Astrolabe. Pl. 35
Aged just twenty when he joined Dumont d’Urville’s 1826–29 Pacific survey, François-Edmond Pâris created a comprehensive visual record of ships and boats encountered. In 1827 he recorded vessels he saw at Ūawa Tolaga Bay and Paepae-o-Tū Bream Bay, and Te Tai-o-Aorere Tasman Bay and Tāmaki Strait, Auckland.
(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)
Collection
Conrad Martens Sydney from the North Shore
Conrad Martens left England for Rio de Janeiro in 1833. By December had reached Montevideo, Uruguay, where he joined Captain FitzRoy and Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle, becoming ship’s artist on a survey of South American coasts. In 1835, Martens settled in Sydney and became an admired landscape painter who also produced popular hand-coloured lithographs.
(Out of Time, 23 September 2023 – 28 April 2024)
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Charles Meryon Le Ministère de la Marine
Charles Meryon’s fantastical Parisian scene presents the French Admiralty building with a flying horde being delivered from the far ends of the globe. The crowd below is thrown into disarray as Roman charioteers, whales and whaleboats, a waka with sails, an anchor, serpents, cowboys and horses with fishtails prepare for landing.
Meryon’s impaired mental state in this period is the usual explanation given for this extraordinary etching. At the same time, it may be viewed as an image laden with personal symbolism as the confounding facts, fantasies and errors of the past make their perplexing return.
Meryon spent three years in Akaroa from 1843–46 as a young naval cadet, protecting the fledgling French settlement. Although this particular colonising plan did not succeed, the streetlamps of Paris were fed a regular supply of whale oil from Banks Peninsula in this period. For Meryon these were formative years and regularly revisited in his imagination. (Kā Honoka, 18 December 2015 – 28 August 2016)
Collection
John Pule On Another Man’s Land
John Pule examines the complex experience of leaving one’s homeland and arriving in another – a reflection on his own migration from Niue to Aotearoa New Zealand. Using the grid-like composition of hiapo, he has developed a symbolic language of spears, migratory birds, sea creatures and geometric patterning that speaks to personal and shared histories of cross-cultural exchange. Here, he also reproduces an eighteenth-century drawing by Raiatean navigator Tupaia, depicting Captain Cook’s botanist Joseph Banks trading with a rakatira from Uawa. It’s an image that complicates our understanding of the dynamics involved in this encounter, and asks us to consider our own place in Aotearoa.
hiapo ~ barkcloth from Niue
rakatira ~ person of high rank, chief, leader
He Kapuka Oneone – A Handful of Soil (from August 2024)