Thousands of miles from the American west another European artist was painting portraits of another indigenous people, on another colonial frontier. Gottfried Lindauer was an ethnic Czech from the city of Pilsen, then part of the Austrian empire. In 1873 he left his home city – largely to avoid conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army – and embarked on a journey that took him far beyond the reach of the Habsburg state. He first gravitated to Germany; then, on 6 August 1874, he landed in New Zealand.
A graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Lindauer was a talented portraitist. One of his particular skills was the ability to transpose on to canvas something of the realism and directness of gaze seen in portrait photography, accentuating the effect through dramatic lighting effects and glazing techniques (although many subsequent critics have suggested his portraits lack sophistication). Lindauer spent the late 1870s and the 1880s touring New Zealand, setting up his studio and offering his services in each town he visited. But he had arrived in his new homeland in the latter stages of a long period of warfare. In 1840, the year of Lindauer’s birth, the Treaty of Waitangi had been signed by Māori chiefs and the British. This much-contested treaty, signed under somewhat dubious circumstances, gave Britain sovereignty over New Zealand – the islands Māori call Aotearoa. There had then followed decades of land acquisition and displacement of Māori by British settlers, in a period that was inevitably one of intermittent warfare between Māori and Pākehā – the Māori term for Europeans. As the Pākehā were supported by local militias as well as British troops, the scales were heavily weighed against Māori resistance. Having, in various ways, lost much of their ancestral land, been subject to war, and exposed to European diseases against which they had no immunity, the Māori population declined precipitously. In the same years waves of settlement enormously swelled the numbers of Europeans. By the end of the nineteenth century, just sixty years after the Treaty of Waitangi, the Māori population had dwindled to a mere 50,000, while the European population approached 1 million.
62. Gottfried Lindauer's youthful self-portrait. Migrating to New Zealand, this Czech artist became perhaps the most respected painter of the Māori.
Gottfried Lindauer’s first patrons were wealthy and prominent figures from late Victorian New Zealand society: politicians, diplomats, landowners and merchants. Some, including Lindauer’s main patron, the tobacco merchant Henry Partridge, commissioned portraits of Māori as well as of themselves and their families. To men like Partridge, such portraits, and paintings of Māori customs and scenes from everyday life, were intended to fulfil an ethnographic function. Like the portraits of George Catlin’s ‘Indian Gallery’, they were envisaged as nostalgic mementoes of the early years of the colony, a pictorial record of an indigenous people who, it was widely presumed, had no long-term future. The English traveller Edward Markham, who visited New Zealand in the 1830s, before Charles Darwin had developed his evolutionary theories, concluded that a preordained process of displacement and extermination was playing out across the world. Like the Native Americans nations, he believed, New Zealand’s Māori population was being pushed towards an inevitable extinction. This bleak, genocidal prospect was seemingly accepted by Markham, and many other nineteenth-century commentators, with calm equanimity.
It seems to me, that the same causes that depopulated the Indian Tribes are doing the same all over the World. In New Zealand the same as in Canada or North America, and in Southern Africa the Hottentots are a decreasing people and by all accounts the Islands of the South Seas are the same. Rum, Blankets, Muskets, Tobacco and Diseases have been the great destroyers; but my belief is the Almighty intended it should be so or it would not have been allowed. Out of Evil comes Good.4
Māori society, however, was not on the threshold of some extinction event. By the 1890s the population began to recover, leading to a Māori revival and a reassertion of traditions and identity.5 An attempt to unite the various Māori tribes had been launched on North Island, in the form of the so-called King Movement, and there was a universal effort to ensure that Māori ancestors were remembered and revered. It was in this latter capacity that Lindauer’s story became entwined with that of Māori Aotearoa.
63, 64. Lindauer's portraits of Māori Chief Tamati Waka Nene (1890), and Heeni Hirini and Child (1878) show people navigating between two cultures and adapting to an era of transformational change.
Māori and Pākehā relations in the late nineteenth century were complex and multi-faceted; they entailed interaction and two-way appropriation, as well as opposition and conflict.6 When Lindauer painted portraits of Māori subjects for European customers, he tended to paint them in traditional dress. When his patrons were Māori, many demanded that they be shown in a hybrid mixture of European and traditional dress, illustrating that they had the skills to move freely between the two cultures. Lindauer’s portraits enabled his Māori sitters to demonstrate that they had secured a place in this complex, fast-changing, hybrid society. Such is the case in Lindauer’s 1884 portrait of Te Rangiotu, a Māori chieftain and successful businessman. Te Rangiotu’s portrait was painted by Lindauer on terms dictated by the chieftain and in accordance with how he wanted to be seen and remembered, and the issue of remembrance was key.
Lindauer’s Māori portraits were rapidly incorporated into Māori culture and belief systems. The significance of Lindauer’s work to Māori communities was noted and recorded when the Czech writer and traveller Josef Korensky visited New Zealand in 1900. Korensky was thrilled to discover that an artist from his same ethnic-Czech background had achieved an elevated status among the little-known people of a land 11,000 miles from Europe. Korensky wrote:
Say Lindauer’s name, and every Māori chief nods their head to indicate they know the artist who painted their portrait. Visit the house of any important public figure at their funeral, and what do you see above the body on display? You see a canvas painting with a spitting image of the chieftain, decorated with ribbons and reminding the guests of the good face of the deceased. And who did the painting you might ask? Looking at the corner of the painting, you will see the artist’s signature: Bohuslav Lindauer.7
Today Gottfried Lindauer’s Māori portraits are highly valued in New Zealand, and increasingly so in the Czech Republic. A number of his portraits, including that of Te Rangiotu, have remained in the possession of the ancestors of the sitters. Such portraits are regarded as embodiments of the spirit of the subject through which a connection can be achieved. Those portraits belonging to Māori communities and families are often held in traditional meeting houses, sacred spaces that have long been the central focus of Māori culture. Conventionally, such meeting houses were adorned with elaborately carved, semi-abstract figures and swirling patterns, each with its own symbolic meaning. After the arrival of Europeans, Māori meeting house decoration began to incorporate more literal, figurative scenes, borrowed from European art, and the new hybrid culture took solid form.
Traditionally, Māori meetings houses are guarded by elaborately carved faces which are themselves connected to another Māori art form, one that Lindauer carefully and dramatically presented in his portraits: Tā moko, facial tattoos. As we know from his own letters, Lindauer went to great lengths to depict the moko of his sitters accurately. In one, Lindauer notes: ‘The Māori are extremely sensitive on the regularity of moko: they are quick to point errors when I am painting them. That is why I studied moko in-depth.’8 Tā moko is today a revived traditional art in modern New Zealand forming a link, for Māori, back to their ancestors. As Tā moko was brought to New Zealand by Māori when they first settled in Aotearoa over 700 years ago, it also provides a link to the other Polynesian cultures that are spread across the Pacific and who practise different forms of tattooing. Tā moko is considered to be a mark of beauty and respect. For centuries each Tā moko carried a specific cultural meaning; they denoted social status and family connections, and no two designs are ever alike. While today, perhaps inevitably, the designs of Tā moko have been appropriated as a global fashion accessory, for many Māori they have been reclaimed as a highly visible symbol of cultural pride and identity.
65. Lindauer won huge respect among the Māori for his skill in depicting the Tā moko (facial tattoos) of his subjects. The same markings – each one unique – appear in the carvings that decorate Marae, traditional Māori meeting houses.
66. Lindauer's portrait of Māori chief and businessman Te Rangiotu is still in the possession of his descendants. Such portraits are regarded not just as representations of ancestors but as embodiments of them and their sprits.
