KEY POINTS:
When his editor asked Auckland arts writer Richard Wolfe to tackle a book surveying New Zealand portraits, his first thoughts were, "What do you mean? Painted portraits? Sculptures? Drawings?"
He resolved that issue by deciding to be specific and stick to the area he knows best: paintings. But then the next question arose: how to define a New Zealand portrait? Should it be by a New Zealander, of a New Zealander? But with our colonial history, such a strict definition would rule out so many works - by European artists who visited here in the 19th century and drew their New Zealand subjects when they returned home. That restriction would also block works by expat artists who left New Zealand, often never to return, and their portraits of people who'd never even set foot in Aotearoa.
So Wolfe decided to be elastic and choose his subjects according to the quality of the work - and the stories behind the paintings. "Once I started looking into this, I realised it would hopefully be more than just a collection of portraits, it would tell us about ourselves," he says. "As soon as I started getting a chronology together, that became apparent."
New Zealand Portraits starts in 1769, with Portrait of a New Zealand Man by Sydney Parkinson, a doomed young artist on Captain Cook's Endeavour voyage to New Zealand. It ends, 81 full-page colour plates later, with Hamish Foote's 2007 study of botanist Thomas Cheeseman, who was appointed curator of Auckland Museum in 1874. Between these two portraits is the narrative of a slowly maturing nation.
Wolfe opens the book with a lengthy and insightful essay on the sometimes shaky status of the art of portraiture in this country. In the early colonial days, many painters - "soldier artists with rudimentary training in drawing" - were much more interested in painting the landscape and topography than people.
The technical skills of painting were also held back because there were no centres for art training until the arrival, in the 1890s, of landscape painters James Nairn, Petrus van der Velden and Girolamo Pieri Nerli, who led the way to establishing classes in Dunedin and Christchurch.
Wolfe notes that when collecting began in 1898 for the planned Otago Early Settlers' Museum, it included portraits of severe-looking people who had settled the region, "an assemblage described by [curator] Roger Blackley as 'stern founding fathers and hard-faced mothers'." Commissions for wealthy families in Canterbury were also popular in the 1920s and 30s, with an emphasis on polite studies of young debutantes and captains of industry in a world which now seems entirely alien.
"There have been periods when portraiture has been very unfashionable; when a lot of commissioned portraits happened and they were, by definition, conservative because the artist has been paid to paint someone they may not know or even like," says Wolfe. "You are not going to do an impressionist view of someone or a profound character study of someone you don't know. That didn't do portraiture as an expressive genre much good."
Portraiture has gone through some tough times, particularly in the 60s and 70s when many believed photography would make usurp the genre. But it has survived, and thrived. Now we have the New Zealand Portrait Gallery, based in Wellington, and the biennial Adam Portraiture Award. New Zealanders frequently feature in the shortlist of Australia's Archibald Prize, which salutes Australasian portraiture.
Peter Stichbury's exhibition of striking, if slightly surreal, faces is touring the country after a successful season at Te Tuhi in Pakuranga, and Rita Angus' retrospective - including many portraits - is providing a stunning visual feast at Te Papa. This book adds yet more weight to the argument that portraiture is the face of our nation.
1. Portrait of a New Zealand Man, 1769, by Sydney Parkinson (British Library)
The trip that brought Parkinson to New Zealand on Captain Cook's Endeavour in 1769 finished him off. Commissioned by Sir Joseph Banks to create natural history drawings, Parkinson's workload increased when another young artist hired to draw the landscape and people they saw on their travels died.
Attempts to make contact with Maori ended in bloodshed at the place Cook called Poverty Bay, and Parkinson's only sights of the people he described as "tataowed" were those who visited the ship by canoe. He never went ashore, but made sketches from those encounters, from which he created pen and wash drawings which were later engraved. Parkinson contracted malaria and dysentery on the journey home and died, aged 26.
2. Woman in a chiffon jacket, 1912, by Raymond McIntyre
Christchurch-born McIntyre studied at the Canterbury School of Art, then moved to London - for good - in 1909, where he took lessons from Walter Sickert. From 1911, he worked on a series of paintings of women's heads, including this lovely study of English actress Phyllis Constance Cavendish. "This transcends the country of origin of the subject," says Wolfe. "This is a more universal sense of design, beauty and inner tranquility. It captures the essence but doesn't go overboard with the detail."
As Wolfe explains in the book, McIntyre's reputation increasingly grew in London, but he received little financial reward. He died suddenly, aged 54, in 1933.
3. Self-portrait, 1873, by Samuel Butler (Alexander Turnbull Library)
This is the first painting that came to Wolfe's mind when he started the book. His first job after attending art school was in 1973, at Canterbury Museum, neighbour to the McDougall Art Gallery (now Canterbury Art Gallery). Wolfe frequently popped into the gallery on his lunch breaks, where he was fascinated by this painting by Butler, New Zealand's "all-time best known sheep farmer" and author of the classic satire, Erewhon.
Wolfe says he is drawn to the work because of its "directness and gutsiness which you tend not to associate with a Victorian portrait". Butler lived in New Zealand for just a few years, where he made a fortune from his Mesopotamia sheep station in Canterbury. He returned to England in 1864, where he studied art and began exhibiting at the Royal Academy. They did not approve of his instinctive style and he came to regard himself as a failure, turning instead to writing.
4. Bridesmaids, 1930, by Frances Hodgkins (Auckland Art Gallery)
Bridesmaids was included in a group exhibition in London in 1930, with reviews hailing the "strikingly original artist". Moreover, the critics "were unable to suggest any artist, English or foreign, who painted more naturally 'in a modern way'," writes Wolfe. "Her increasing use of abstraction was apparent in simplified forms and surface patterning."
Hodgkins was another expat. She died in London, in 1947, at the age of 78. The following year, Bridesmaids entered Auckland Art Gallery as part of a collection of 151 English works of art presented by Lucy Wertheim, the owner of the London gallery who first exhibited it.
5. Portait of Betty Curnow, 1954, by Louise Henderson (Chrisrtchurch Art Gallery)
Cubism came to New Zealand via Parisian Louise Sauze, who married a New Zealander and became Louise Henderson, of Christchurch, then Wellington, then Auckland.
Betty Curnow, wife of poet Allen Curnow, was a popular subject, famously painted 12 years earlier by her friend Rita Angus. That is a much more direct portrait.
Henderson, who studied art at Elam in the early 50s under John Weeks, steadily moved towards abstraction. "The cubism reflects the new influences coming to New Zealand," says Wolfe. "So portraiture not only had landscape to deal with but abstraction. It got pushed further down the list to the extent that come the mid-50s to the 60s, it seemed to get very little representation in major exhibitions."
6. Colin McCahon, 1968, by Garth Tapper (Hocken Collections)
Tapper, considered one of our leading portrait painters, created one of New Zealand's most famous works: Five O'Clock, depicting a pub and the desperate final hour called the six o'clock swill in 1968. Tapper trained at Elam then taught there in the 60s, where he worked with fellow lecturer Colin McCahon, who invited him to paint him.
The sitting took place in McCahon's Elam studio, and the portrait includes one of his Waterfall paintings, while the nude at top left represents a work by Tapper. McCahon's posture in the painting, Wolfe suggests, shows "the painter's need to combine intellectual inquiry with solid practice".
7. Self-portrait with the Last Huia, 2004, by Paul Jackson (private collection)
Born in Auckland, Jackson has lived in Sydney since the mid-70s but exhibits in both countries. A five-time finalist in the Archibald Prize, this painting was among those contending for the prize in 2004. It followed from an earlier work, Self-portrait with Tui (also an Archibald finalist, in 1996), in which he represented himself as an assemblage of crustacea and included an image of his dog, Tui.
The huia in this painting is a memorial to the extinct birds, to his father, and to Tui the dog, who had died. Jackson's portrait of Australian tragi-comedian Garry McDonald won the People's Choice Award in the Archibalds in 2006.
8. My Sad Captain, 2006, by Gavin Hurley (private collection)
Is this a sad Captain Cook? "You can suspect it is but Gavin won't tell you," says Wolfe. "I think it's nice the way he plays with history. The slightly deadpan, self-effacing characters from history with just enough clues to make you suspect you know who they are. But, as he points out, in New Zealand, anyone wearing a wig like that we assume is Captain Cook.
"But in 18th century England there could have been thousands of captains like that."
Hurley, Wolfe points out, was influenced at an early stage by a simple Rita Angus portrait, Head of a Maori Boy, because of its anonymity. "He has established another mould or template, as he calls it, for looking at a historical figure," says Wolfe.
9. Untitled (Dudley Benson), 2007, by Peter Stichbury (private collection)
"Most of Peter's very distinctive paintings are of fashion victims, young women and men who have been glamourised to the point of becoming unattractive," says Wolfe.
"This painting is very different. It's a young lad suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He doesn't look like a soldier - despite his uniform - and his medals are all imaginary."
Although the painting is based on a photo of Auckland musician Dudley Benson, it's a fictional work depicting another sort of victim altogether.
The inspiration, says Wolfe, is Stichbury's take on television's ratings-driven dramatisation of world events.
10. Thomas Cheeseman and the Linnean Medal, 2007, by Hamish Foote (private collection)
Auckland artist Hamish Foote almost didn't make it into the book. Wolfe had virtually completed it when the two met socially and Foote invited him to his place to have a look at the Cheeseman portrait. Cheeseman was curator of Auckland Museum when it was situated in Princes St and can be credited for its rapid growth and advocacy of its position in Auckland Domain. He was honoured with the medal from the Linnean Society of London in 1923. Foote's painting contains many clever references, including a homage to the style of Piero della Francesca, Dutch artist Hans Memling and John Barr Clarke Hoyte's 1870s watercolours of Auckland Harbour.
"Hamish's work is very modern in the sense it has a strong, gem-like quality," says Wolfe, "but it refers back to paintings from the Renaissance. There are these extra levels of interpretation and meaning which add to the intrigue. There are lots of little clues."
* New Zealand Portraits (Penguin/Viking $80) is released on Monday.
