19th Century Painting

The Europeans arriving in New Zealand from the early nineteenth century onwards were particularly taken with the unfamiliar, and to their eyes, wild land and people. The resulting sketches, paintings and drawings were more often a reflection of their impressions and imagination, rather than of the land and its people in reality. In many colonial works the treatment of the landscape is often more comparable to the English countryside than the native environment of New Zealand at this time.

The names now well known to us from this period are John Barr Clarke Hoyte, Alfred Sharpe, Charles Heaphy, Charles Blomfield, John Kinder, Petrus Van de Velden, Louis John Steele, John Gully and Charles Goldie. In many cases, these artists were intending for their paintings to appeal to prospective settlers to whom the land was intended to appear empty and waiting for arrival. In early colonial works Maori were seldom depicted within landscape paintings and in other works were often depicted with Europeanised features. During later years, while the portraits of Charles Goldie may be seen as an exception, his works still do not necessarily reflect the reality of Maori culture at this time but rather portrayed the way in which Maori were perceived by the Europeans.

Popular subjects included the lakes, waterfalls and mountains of the South Island and the Rotorua environment with its spectacular Pink and White Terraces, thermal pools and geysers. The earliest images of these subjects were watercolour and/or pencil sketches as many were done in the field by the map makers and surveyors of the first European voyages into the Pacific. For the first years of colonisation, watercolour remained the preferred medium due to its ease of use and portability, later as settlements grew it became possible for artists to make larger studies and more and more works were executed in oils.