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FIG. 1 (above):
Samuel Carnell, Gottfried
Lindauer Sitting in the
Mahau (Porch) of the
Heretaunga Meetinghouse
at Taradale, North Island,
c. 1880–1900.
Private collection.
Gottfried Lindauer (1839–1926)
was New Zealand’s most prolifi c portrait painter
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
He is best known for his remarkable and
revealing portraits of nineteenth-century Maori
chiefs, leaders, and prominent fi gures from this
colonial period. His honorifi c portraits draw us
in to the sitter’s psyche with their fi nely rendered
details and atmospheric backgrounds projecting
their prestige and renown. The Maori Portraits:
Gottfried Lindauer’s New Zealand, developed in
partnership with the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o
Tamaki and including loans from the Auckland
War Memorial Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira, is
among the most signifi cant exhibitions of Lindauer’s
Maori portraits ever to be staged. The exhibition
features thirty-one portraits painted between
1874 and 1903, spanning Lindauer’s career in his
adopted homeland of New Zealand. These arresting
images pay tribute to the individuals who led
their tribal communities in a time of dramatic political
and social change. They document peacemakers
and warriors, politicians and diplomats,
tour guides and landholders, entrepreneurs, and
global traders. They include men and women who
acted in defi ance or in defense of the colonial government
during the New Zealand Land Wars of
the 1860s and several of whom signed Te Tiriti o
Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi), New Zealand’s
founding document, in 1840.
Lindauer was born in Pilsen, Bohemia, then
part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now
part of the Czech Republic. At sixteen he began to
train as an artist, traveling to Vienna and studying
privately with faculty from the Academy of Arts
in Vienna. One of his fi rst paintings dates to 1861
when he was twenty-two. He worked independently
in the Nazarene style, painting portraits
and religious subjects through the 1860s. Lindauer
arrived in New Zealand in 1874 at the age of
thirty-fi ve, establishing his fi rst studio in the town
of Nelson, where he would settle in 1875. He left
few clues as to why he immigrated to New Zealand,
but there he quickly gained popularity both
with settlers and Maori for his lifelike portraits,
and he became the best-known painter of eminent
Maori, creating the largest number of Maori
painted portraits in existence.
In late 1875, Lindauer met Henry Partridge, a
businessman who had established H. E. Partridge
& Co. selling tobacco and sporting goods on the
large thoroughfare of Queen Street in Auckland.
Partridge commissioned four portraits, including
one of Eruera Maihi Patuone (fi g. 2), and he became
Lindauer’s chief patron. Lindauer has portrayed
Patuone, a venerable, defi ant, and wise
PORTFOLIO
THE MAORI
PORTRAITS:
Gottfried Lindauer’s
New Zealand
By Nigel Borell and Christina Hellmich