Charles Frederick Goldie and his controversial Maori Portraits

Charles Frederick Goldie (1870–1947) was a New Zealand artist, best known for his portrayal of Māori dignitaries.

• Biography

Goldie was born in Auckland on 20 October 1870. His father, David Goldie, was a prominent timber merchant and politician, and a strict Primitive Methodist who resigned as Mayor of Auckland rather than toast the visiting Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York with alcohol. His mother, Maria Partington, was an amateur artist and encouraged his artistic ability.

Goldie was educated at Auckland Grammar School, and while still at school won several prizes from the Auckland Society of Arts and the New Zealand Art Students' Association. Sir George Grey was impressed by two of Goldie's still-life paintings that were being exhibited at the Auckland Academy of Art (Steele's art society, of which Goldie was honorary secretary) in 1891, and he talked David Goldie into permitting his son to undertake further art training abroad.

Goldie went to Paris to study at the famous Académie Julian. This was a conservative institution, resistant to Impressionism and the avant-garde, and Goldie received a strong grounding in traditional, formal drawing and painting.

He returned to New Zealand in 1898 and established the "French Academy of Art" with Louis J. Steele, who had been his tutor prior to his departure. They collaborated on the large painting The Arrival of the Māoris in New Zealand, based on Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. It depicting exhausted, starved and stormtossed Polynesian mariners sighting land after a long journey by catamaran. It has been criticized as historically inaccurate (even in terms of contemporary anthropological knowledge) in its appearance of the crew and their vessel and in the situation of near-shipwreck depicted. However, it was widely praised at the time.

Goldie and Steele parted ways not long afterwards and Goldie established his own studio. From 1901 he made field trips to meet, sketch and photograph Māori people in their own locations, and he also paid Māori visitors to Auckland to sit for him. Most of these were chiefs visiting the Native Land Court.

By far the majority of Goldie's subjects were elderly, tattooed Māori of considerable standing in their own society. (The practice of tattooing - Tā moko - was no longer current at the time, and the remaining examples were mostly elderly; it was also a practice largely confined to high-status individuals.)

Goldie's work has been criticised as "racist" and certainly he held the Victorian attitudes he had grown up with that the Māori were a "dying race" and in many ways inferior to Europeans .However, many Māori value his images of their ancestors highly.

Despite some critics considering his paintings "not art», on the rare occasions they are offered for sale they fetch high prices, among the highest for New Zealand paintings. On 19 November 2010 opera diva Dame Kiri Te Kanawa sold the oil on canvas Forty Winks, a portrait of Rutene Te Uamairangi for $573,000. This is the most paid for a painting at auction in New Zealand. Many Goldies are held in public collections, including those at the Auckland Art Gallery, the Auckland Institute and Museum, and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Goldie resumed painting around 1930; in 1934 and 1935 he exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and in 1935, 1938 and 1939; the Salon of the “Société des artistes français”. He stopped painting altogether in 1941 and died on 11 July 1947 aged seventy seven.

• New Zealand’s greatest artists and one of the most controversial

In one aspect, C.F. Goldie was a man who held racist beliefs about his subjects: drawn to the Maori subjects for their exoticism and fully believing that the Native peoples were inferior to Europeans. The poses he painted them in emphasized his notion of the “noble savage” and that they were a “dying race:”

Goldie’s presentation of his Maori art portraits with almost photographic attention to detail conveyed an impression of naturalism, but were also posed and artificial. His paintings rarely show young, vital Maori adapting to and embracing the future, but instead concentrate on elders often appearing worn-out, submissive and defeated. This was accentuated by the titles of Goldie’s works. Titles such as Tumai Tawhiti "The Last of the Cannibals", Patara Te Tuhi "An Old Warrior" add to the impression that these Maori are the last survivors of a dying race.

Right into the 1940s Goldie continued to portray elderly Maori in traditional costume and settings. In his work he failed to show the many challenges to their traditional lifestyle which Maori had encountered and overcome.

Many titles of Goldie’s paintings also suggest a paternalistic, pitying attitude towards Maori: The Last of the Cannibals, A Noble Relic of a Noble Race, Weary With Years. This painting is no exception. Darby and Joan are characters from a sentimental eighteenth century English ballad and the term has come to represent any elderly couple or life-long partners. It is thought that Ina Te Papatahi is Joan in this painting and the carved ancestral figure, Darby.

At the same time, however, his portraits of the Maori elders served as academic studies of Maori facial tattooing. This form of tattooing was worn by the respected elders of the Maori people and created by chiseling into the skin, creating ridges in the skin along with the tattoo. At the time, European Christian missionaries had decried the practice as “the devil’s art,” and only the older generation of Maori wore them. Goldie’s work helped preserve the portraits of Maori ancestors that would have otherwise been lost. And, recently, the renewal of ta moko tattoos for Maori people today would not be possible without the source references provided by Goldie’s work.

Nevertheless, despite the attitude of the artist, today’s irony is that the Maori people are certainly not a “dying race.” As art historian Roger Blackley observes: "Charles F. Goldie may have assumed he was doing future generations a great service by recording “the Maori as he was”; by picturing, for posterity, the vanishing times of a noble race. He misjudged his sitters. He misjudged their descendants. He assumed too much. The world has moved on, indeed.