‘As Rembrandt Would Have Painted the Māori’: the portraits of Perira te Kahukura 1914 and Tamati Pehiriri 1940 by C.F Goldie

For more than a century many New Zealanders (arts industry stakeholders and general public) have warmed to these now iconic images of elderly, wistfully posed rangatira. The subjects are ‘leaders’ with whom Goldie often established personal relationships and whom he revered.

One is not sure how exactly he viewed the Tūhourangi/Ngāti Whakaue kui Perira te Kahukura (Ngāheke) 1914 and the Te Tai Tokerau koroheke Tamati Pehiriri 1940. However, some notes in Goldie’s own handwriting regarding another sitter, the Te Rarawa leader Takahi Atama Paparangi, are suggestive,‘…a splendid type of Māori aristocrat over 6 feet high with fine features and dignified bearing and even when approaching the century he was remarkably erect and soldierly in his bearing.’2 As descendants all Māori love to whakamana ‘give prestige’ to tā tātou tūpuna ‘our ancestors’. But might one equate these notes with wānanga: the kinds of ‘narratives’ accompanying and expanding on whakapapa ‘genealogy’? Goldie was similarly an earnest admirer.

Much of the deciphering of these works takes the artist’s own lead. However, these portraits of Māori beg broader scrutiny. They are far more complex objects that less comfortably, but perhaps more richly, occupy the threshold of two very different cultures. At times there are similar, but not quite the same, values and aesthetics: and at the end of all the self-examination – there is still Māori and Pākehā. What, for example, does this western tradition of portraiture, in which Goldie trained (1893–1897) at the Académie Julian in Paris and then later briefly under a leading portraitist in Scotland, have to do with how Māori present their own? Perhaps the closest ‘traditional’ aesthetic in Māori visual art is the poutokomanawa ‘the central carved ridgepole support post’ found within the whare whakairo ‘carved meetinghouse’. These robust, three dimensional figurative columns depicting ancestors are probably as close as one might get to the physical presence, appearance and the unique character of an ancestor Goldie suggests in his two dimensional oil on canvas or board portraits.

Perhaps a more straightforward context for understanding Goldie might be the preponderance of ancestral photographs that began lining the walls of our whare (particularly in Northern meetinghouses) from the nineteenth century onwards. In these memorial venerations of ngā hunga mate ‘the deceased’ one catches glimpses of Goldie’s intent. Indeed at times copies of ancestral images by Goldie, Lindauer and others occupy some whare throughout Aotearoa. The parallel was not one lost on Dr. Roger Blackley (former Curator, Historical New Zealand Art, AAG and a key interpreter of the artist) who progressively set aside space to mimic the walls
of our whare. Assembling Goldie and Lindauer ancestral portraits on part of Toi Tāmaki’s ground floor gallery his
institution suggested a mārae space to welcome iwi ‘pantribal’ descendants visiting the blockbuster ‘Te Maori’ exhibition returning from prestigious institutions in the United States in 1987. The difference today though, between a quality Goldie portrait (fetching over a million dollars) in a metropolitan gallery or in a wealthy New Zealand home and a copy of a Goldie in a community whare, is enormous and telling.

There are differences the artist himself has raised that also might impede audiences and potential buyers better understanding the more intangible value of his work. He is often portrayed as a conservative realist. His newspaper tyrades about modernism do little to help. One local letter to the editor concludes, ’...we must not allow our galleries to become “dumping grounds” for the “vulgar”, “meaningless”, modern “rubbish’...hawked about the artworld today labelled “Art.”’3 Goldie’s reaction (to waning late career popularity) seems to confirm a despising of modernism. There is however much that connects his efforts with that of later New Zealand artists
working with Māori content around the time he stopped painting in 1941. A broader look at such a context helps open up a wider palette of possibilities for reading these two Goldie portraits.

Ironically much connects Perira te Kahukura (Ngāheke) 1914 and Tamati Pehiriri 1940 with the work of local modernists, like Gordon Walters and Rau Hōtere. Both Hotere and Goldie, for example, were interested in the mood and the emotional state that darkness or blackness evoked in their work. Both loved the work of Rembrant van Rijn. Both made pilgrimages to collections of his painting and printmaking throughout Europe. It is Rembrandt’s use of tone where figures emerge and recede out of and, respectively, into darkness and the metaphor of blackness that appears influential to both.

Walters and Hotere were also similarly interested – whether through appropriation or intuition – in quoting something unique from Māori culture. Walters (like Goldie) used evocative cultural titles, like Kahukura (a Māori atua associated with the rainbow), 1968 one of his koru paintings, despite claims his work was formalist and purely about design relations. As with Walters’ highly personal titles, that sometimes included the names of rangatira (take for example the 1964 reference to Taranaki pacifist Te Whiti o Rongomai who spurned representation) both admired te ao Māori. Both used the camera to record Māori content that was reworked in the studio.

Goldie’s labels are an equally complex and often misunderstood layer. There is a certain grimness to the historical context of both Pehiriri and Te Kahukura (Ngāheke) and their representation. Other versions of these same sitters show Goldie’s regular attempts to reach his audience with sentimentalism, stoicism and patriotism. A portrait of Tamati Pehiriri bequeathed to the Christchurch Art Gallery collection in 1943 was initially known by the title ‘Whitening Snow of Venerable Age’ and quotes a line from ‘The Castle of Indolence’ 1748 by Scottish poet James Thompson (1700–1748). The portrait of Pehiriri in this auction was originally prefaced with the cryptic phrase, ‘Tribal Troubles’.

What do these titles mean and what might Goldie have intended? Again I think nomenclature in Goldie’s paintings is a gathering point for very different cultural ideas. And how might Māori audiences read these beautifully crafted portraits of late nineteenth /early twentieth century leaders? Ngā uri whakatipu o ēnei tūpuna ‘the Māori descendants of these ancestors’ have always revered and celebrated their likenesses captured by this important New Zealand artist. Regardless of highs and lows in Goldie’s reputation enthusiasm has never waned. More importantly, despite the troubled roles Goldie regularly apportioned his sitters all is forgiven!

There is a whakataukī that helps describe this unique predicament present in this bicultural reading of these portraits. He kokonga whare e kitea, he kokonga ngākau e kore e kitea ‘The corners of a house can be seen, but not the corners of the heart.’ Valuable commodities like whenua ‘land’ are easily understood as taonga. These portraits have themselves moved into the realm of taonga as demonstrated by New Zealand laws that now make it difficult to export Goldie’s ancestral images. Less easy to commodify are the intangible areas of attachment that make these portraits invaluable.

Rangihīroa Panoho

1 ‘As Rembrandt Would Have Painted the Māori’: Goldie’s own description of his portrait of Hera Puna

2 C.F Goldie, Manuscript Notes on his painting, ‘The Calm Close of Life’s Long Day’, collection: Toi o Tāmaki

3 New Zealand Herald 28 September 1934:15