The honourable relic
By Hamish Coney,
Goldie captures the story of a nation in two portraits—but not as he intended
[Art]
“History never repeats,” Tim Finn told himself a few years ago before he went to sleep. Incorrect, Tim. The past is always alive in art, and keeps re-asserting itself in startling ways on a regular basis. This was a thought that came to me while examining two classic portraits by Charles Goldie at the exhibition ‘Likeness and Character’ at the Auckland City Art Gallery.
The show runs until April 2008 and I urge Idealog readers to make a point of visiting it. The two Goldies demonstrate that in a colonial country such as New Zealand our art history and our actual history are often one and the same.
The first image to examine is The Honourable Mr Swanson from 1901. This is a classic power image, one that queasily gives rise to both pride and shame in this Pakeha New Zealander. Swanson is the very image of the pioneering colonist. You know the type: got in early around the 1840s, picked up a bit of cheap dirt, made a packet, moved on to Parliament and later did a few good deeds. Goldie portrays him as a Dickensian character with spectacular mutton-chop sideburns and the understated confidence of that peculiar creation of the British Empire in its late Victorian phase: the wildcat speculator turned solid citizen in his dotage.
The late 19th century was a global feeding frenzy and the Mr Swansons of the world filled their boots and bank accounts, in Swanson’s case by logging the hell out of the Waitakeres from the 1850s onward.
As another saying has it, “One man’s meat is another man’s murder,” and Goldie unwittingly provides evidence of this on the opposite wall from Mr Swanson with the doleful masterpiece A Noble Relic of a Noble Race—Wharekauri Tahuna, Tohunga of the Tuhoe Tribe. The grim irony of the two men’s fates cannot be ignored in the aged face of the Maori, who was over 100 years old when this heartbreaker of a painting was completed in 1910.
Charles Goldie (1870–1947), The Honourable William Swanson MLC 1901, oil on canvas. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki (gift of the artist)
Goldie made a handsome living from depictions of the ‘last’ of the Maori. The fear at the time was that Maori were dying out. Goldie specialised in capturing these specimens, complete with moko, huia feathers and hei tiki, and saving them for posterity and future generations such as you and I. The works contain both the laudable aim of preservation and a lack of self-awareness that borders on the unctuous. Goldie could happily depict both the victor in Mr Swanson and the despoiled in the form of the dispossessed Wharekauri Tahuna without, it seems, making the connection.
I must have looked at various Goldie portraits thousands of times since I was a schoolboy and, like most, I have marvelled at the level of skill and painterly dexterity that Goldie could muster. This time, seeing the portraits of Swanson and Wharekauri Tahuna together, I can see why many Maori to this day view Goldie with a high degree of ambivalence.
Notwithstanding the importance of these portraits as magnificent depictions of ancestors and important tribal taonga, the overarching sense of grieving for a vanquished tribal past can make these images maudlin and at times even patronising.
“The devil is in the detail,” runs another apposite saying, and details in each of the portraits bring them alive in 2007. The Swanson painting could be any good-quality Victorian mercantile portrait. Nothing gives away the New Zealand connection other than the small pounamu pendant that hangs from Mr Swanson’s otherwise very proper fob chain. That flash of greenstone gives the work pathos and just maybe the hint of an awakening consciousness.
The other small detail can be found in the title of the painting of the Maori. Wharekauri Tahuna was a tohunga of the Ngai Tuhoe. At the time his portrait was painted, one Rua Kenana was articulating the distinctive Tuhoe worldview and getting into all sorts of grief.
Recently, Tuhoe, their land and beliefs have been in the news again. History repeating itself? It’s impossible not to wonder what William Swanson and Wharekauri Tahuna would make of the state of the nation in 2007.
Anonymous comments on this post are disabled. Please sign up to post a new comment.