Gottfried Lindauer (1839-1926), along with C.F. Goldie (1870-1947), was the most prolific and best-known painter of Māori subjects, in particular portraits, in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries.
He was born in Pilsen, Bohemia, then part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. Despite his German-sounding surname, he
was ethnically Czech and was initially named Bohumir (Fig. 1) .
Fig.1 Photographer
Unknown, Gottfried Lindauer, ca 1899, b&w photo-mechanical
print, Timeframes
Professionally trained at the Academy Fine Arts in Vienna, he
migrated to New Zealand in 1874. Various reasons have been cited
for this shift: a wish to avoid compulsory military service and the
decline in portrait commissions as a result of photography, for
instance. Lindauer's first portraits of Māori were painted in Nelson.
A move to Auckland in the mid 1870s proved crucial. There he met
businessman, Henry Partridge (1848-1931), who over the
next 30-plus years commissioned from Lindauer numerous
portraits of eminent Māori, both living and deceased, as well as
large-scale depictions of re-enactments of traditional Māori life
and customs. The aim of the project was to create a pictorial
history of Māori at a time when it was widely, though mistakenly,
believed that Māori were dying out, either literally or as a
distinct cultural group.
Lindauer travelled extensively round New Zealand. He lived in a
variety of locations besides Nelson and Auckland, notably
Christchurch, Napier, where he was closely associated with the
photographer Samuel Carnell (1832-1920), also a well-known
portraitist of Māori, and finally, from 1889, Woodville. Lindauer
also retained his European and, in particular, his Czech
connections. He visited Britain in 1886 for the massive Colonial
and Indian exhibition in London, at which 12 of his Māori
portraits were displayed. The commissioner of the New Zealand
pavilion was Walter Buller (1838-1906), otherwise a Native Land
Court lawyer who represented both Māori and European clients, and
an important patron of the artist. Lindauer and his family lived in
Europe, mainly Germany, in 1900-02 and 1911-14, with short returns
to Bohemia, as a result of which several of his Māori portraits
were placed in public and private collections there.
Lindauer's portraits of Māori are diverse in their subjects and
in how he depicted them. They can be presented full-length,
half-length or in bust format for instance; frontal, body in
profile or face to the front, as in his many portraits of Ana
Rupene and her baby. Besides his portraits of eminent Māori, he
produced many of little-known or ordinary Māori people, most of
whom wear European dress, as would have been the case in their
daily life. Most, but not all, of these were probably commissioned
by the sitters or their families. In contrast, in Lindauer's Māori
portraits for European patrons, most of the subjects, but again not
all, are shown in traditional and ceremonial Māori costume; markers
of exotic difference to European viewers many of whom would have
had little personal familiarity with such appearances.
Lindauer could depict the same person very differently from one
portrait to another. For instance, the famous chief Renata
Tama-ki-Hikurangi Kawepo of Ngāti Te Upokoiri/Ngāti Kahungunu (c
1805-1888) is portrayed both in Māori dress, holding a mere, and in
European dress in 1885 pictures. In the former (at Whanganui
Regional Museum) he is idealised and does not show his actual
age. Significantly he is depicted with two good eyes, even though
he had lost an eye in the 1860s. The portrait of him in European
clothes (painted for Partridge) (Fig. 2) is more realistic, in that
he looks his actual, old age, one eye is appropriately disfigured
and he is placed closer to the front plane of the painting, so that
it is as if he is, almost, in our, the viewers' space. That is,
Lindauer adopted differing modes of portraiture, according to the
requirements of the commission or occasion.
Henry Partridge opened a gallery in Queen Street, Auckland, in
1901, which initially featured 40 of Lindauer's Māori
portraits. By the time Partridge gifted his Lindauer collection to
the Auckland Art Gallery in 1915, there were 62 portraits.
These became the best known, most seen, by Pākehā, Māori and
visitors to New Zealand, and most reproduced of Lindauer's
portraits. The historian, James Cowan (1870-1943), the first and
for a long time the only Pākehā historian, for whom New Zealand
colonial history was not only or primarily a matter of European
achievements, but one in which Māori were equally important, wrote
a Descriptive Catalogue of the collection. He characterised it as
'unrivalled in the world' and a record of the 'old order', which in
his opinion 'passed away forever' with King Tawhiao's death in
1894.
How Lindauer's portraits have been seen, understood and
evaluated has, though, varied enormously, depending on their
viewers' and owners' views, knowledge and needs, and on the
different socio-cultural contexts of use. For many colonial
Europeans, the portraits, besides representing supposedly vanishing
Māori culture, functioned as ethnographic documents, providing an
inventory of Māori physiognomy, moko, dress, artifacts
and ornaments. For some settler colonists the portraits may well
have been experienced too as kinds of trophy: emblems of settler
colonial power over Māori. And subsequently Lindauer's Māori
portraits have become valuable commercial commodities, financial
instruments that can be profitably bought and sold.
Fig.4 Exhibition
display stand presumed to be at the Naprstek Museum
The monetary commodification of Lindauer's portraits has
concerned Māori since the late colonial period. For many Māori,
especially the families and descendants of the portrayed, the
paintings have very different values and meanings. They were
and are experienced as embodiments of the presence, spirit and mana of the person, as links
between the past and present, and as taonga that need to be
protected, and which also protect people and culture. As the man
who made the portraits, Lindauer too was held in high regard. The
responses to Lindauer's paintings by Māori visitors recorded in the
Lindauer Art Gallery Māori Visitors' Book testify to this.
Lindauer's personality remains rather elusive. He respected
Māori people and culture. Reportedly he was an atheist or agnostic
at a time and in a society when that was not common. His actions
and career suggest that he was independent-minded. In some
fundamental respects he lived on the margins of mainstream settler
colonial society. He rarely exhibited at art society shows in New
Zealand, and lived most of his life here in small towns. He was
frequently misidentified as German, and during World War One was
subject to some social ostracism and hostility because of his
former 'Austrian' nationality. These experiences were very
upsetting for him and his family.
Lindauer maintained close connections with a number of fellow
Czechs, both in New Zealand and Bohemia - notably the leading
naturalist and collector, Vaclav Fric, and the ethnographer,
Vojtech Naprstek, and his wife, Josepha, founders of the Naprstek
Museum in Prague (Fig. 3). This Museum holds two of Lindauer's
Māori portraits and two of his rare drawings of moko designs, as
well as Māori artifacts and photographs of Māori subjects that the
artist gifted to the Vojtechs (Fig. 4).
The then-prominent Czech writer and global traveller, Josef
Korensky (1847-1938) met up with Lindauer in New Zealand in 1900,
having previously written an article on his work for the Czech
periodical, Vesmir, in 1896. Korensky described the coming
together of a Czech artist and Māori as 'incredible' in his 1905
book on his travels in Australia and New Zealand, in which he also
stressed how Lindauer's portraits were used and valued by Māori -
at a time when these dimensions of Lindauer's work were generally
overlooked by Europeans in New Zealand: 'Say the name, Lindauer,
and every Māori chief will nod his head…When you attend a funeral
and visit the house of a chief, what do you see above the displayed
corpse? You will see a painting (Fig. 5), which is the true
likeness of the chief. And who was the creator of this work? If you
look at the corner of the …painting, you will recognize the
artist's signature: Bohuslav Lindauer', Korensky wrote.1
Fig.6 Lindauer,
Gottfried Rebecca Lindauer oil on canvas offered for sale in Webb's
catalogue, Historical Works of Art as Lot 25, 16 September 2008.
Image printed with the permission of Webb's Auckland.
What is unique about Lindauer's portraits of Māori? Korensky, in
Wellington, was elated by the fact that 'a Czech artist…was
standing there in this far foreign land'. Lindauer's Māori subject
pictures are the result of encounters between otherwise very
different people. His paintings are complex inter-weavings of
elements drawn from diverse cultures and societies - Māori, Czech,
German, Austrian, English (his second wife, Rebecca Petty was
English) (Fig. 6), French, and emerging Pākehā. In this respect an
artist commonly criticised as conservative and old-fashioned can
now be seen to have been ahead of his time.
Leonard Bell, Associate Professor, Art History, University of
Auckland Te Whare Wananga o Tāmaki Makaurau
Further readings:
Leonard Bell, 'Lindauer (1839 - 1926), Chapter 9 in The
Māori in European Art: A survey of the representation of the Māori
by European artists from the time of Captain Cook to the present
day, Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed Ltd, 1980, pp. 62 -
69.
Leonard Bell, 'Gottfried Lindauer', Dictionary of New
Zealand Biography, Wellington: Allen & Unwin/Department of
Internal Affairs, 1990
Leonard Bell, 'Lindauer's Paintings of Māori Customs and
Legend', Chapter 6 in Colonial Constructs: European Images of
Māori 1840 - 1914, Auckland & Melbourne, Auckland
University Press & Melbourne University Press, 1992, pp. 195 -
221
Leonard Bell, 'Crossing Boundaries: Gottfried Lindauer, a Czech
artist in New Zealand and his Paintings of Māori', Umeni /
Art (Journal of the Institute of Art History of the Academy of
Sciences of the Czech Republic), 4, XLVIII/2000, pp. 218- 230
James Cowan, Māori Biographies: Sketches of Old New Zealand:
Descriptive Catalogue of Māori Portraits Painted by Herr. G.
Lindauer, Auckland: Brett Publishing Co., 1901.
James Cowan, Pictures of Old New Zealand: The Partridge
Collection of Māori Paintings by Gotttfried Lindauer,
Auckland: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1930.
Briar Gordon and Peter Stupples, Gottfried Lindauer: His
Life and Māori Art, Auckland: Collins, 1985
J.C. Graham, Māori Paintings: Pictures from the Partridge
Collection of Paintings by Gottfried Lindauer, Wellington:
Reed, 1966