The galleries: Work transcends time, place and attitudes

By T.J. NcNAMARA

It's curious how hard it is to get to know Victorian gentlemen behind their beards. Charles Darwin, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, even Charles Dickens wore flourishing beards that hid their tension and secret neuroses. We have our own contender in the bearded mystery stakes. The solemnly wooden portrait of the Reverend Doctor John Kinder given to the Theological College in Auckland shows him with full white beard and whiskers but reveals nothing of the subject's character.

Ironically, it was done from a photograph. We might know little of the idiosyncrasies of his personality, but the grand exhibition of his work at the Auckland City Gallery shows that the Reverend Doctor was a remarkable early photographer as well as a fine amateur artist. His achievement is unique in our short art history.

Kinder's work became widely known only after his death since a lot of his work was kept in albums accessible only to his family. He has his considerable niche in New Zealand's art history because his photographs give us a sharp record of places seen in his indefatigable travels around the new country. More importantly, his watercolour works not only record but many of them convey a golden vision about the kind of society that might grow up here.

The works are neat, passionless, and tell of people only by implication. They show us not the way we were but how it was and a hint of how he thought it might be.

The exhibition, John Kinder's New Zealand, runs until May and then will tour the country. It is accompanied by a book of the same title, edited by Ron Brownson, who curated the exhibition. It contains an essay on the nature of Kinder's achievement by Michael Dunn, who did basic research on the artist. His outstanding earlier book has become something of a rarity since it was a limited edition. This excellent book fills a need. There are also contributions from Peter Shaw and Roger Blackley, both experts in Victorian art and society.

Kinder was a classics scholar, mathematician and clergyman. He was appointed the first headmaster of the Church of England Grammar School, a job he combined with being chaplain of the garrison. He lived first in Karangahape Rd when it was on the edge of farmland and then in the headmaster's house which survives at the top of Ayr St. Later he lived at St John's College in Meadowbank and in Remuera.

Wherever he lived he painted views and they frequently incorporated churches. When he sketched Remuera, St Marks Old Church is prominent in a landscape that includes only one house. His view of Onehunga has a couple more houses but the steepled church is in the centre. He took a view of old St Pauls (long demolished) on its promontory - now also long gone - but did not make much of the road to Parnell, then described as being "near Auckland". Churches were important to him not just professionally but also as symbols of colonisation and the spread of the gospel.

One of the most delightful yet telling of his watercolours shows the master's garden at St John's College in 1878. The gardener is in the act of scything the level lawns while on the nearby path a solitary clergyman in black meditates. The tidy lawns, the terrace, the buttressed house, even the gardener's wheelbarrow prominent in the foreground, all speak of disciplining, ordering and bringing sound English values to the other side of the world.

But Kinder ventured far outside his home city and brought his golden vision to the Bay of Islands, to the Hokianga to Tauranga, to Northland and, toward the end of his life, to Dunedin.

His vision is tinted gold because his precise draughtsmanship was carefully coloured in shades of yellow and brown, getting darker as they came toward the foreground in the manner recommended in the painting manuals of the time. Kinder, like a great many educated Victorians, was trained in a way of "taking a view" by systematic application of colour washes.

It must be said that the results are not inspiring but they are very important. They do not move the heart but they do stimulate curiosity, even amazement, beyond their documentary value.

It is an exhibition to be looked at very closely. There is an abundance of detail in his pictures of the Bay of Islands in 1888 or the Waitangi Falls in 1864 or even the Waiwera Hotel in 1877.

Some of these watercolours have great charm, such as the view of Auckland from the verandah of Mr Reader Wood's cottage done in 1856, showing a tiny Auckland without a native plant in sight but with roses twining round the verandah posts.

Most of these watercolours were worked up from sketches done on the spot or from photographs. In middle age Kinder mastered the difficult processes of wet-plate photography. His photographs are at once darker and harder than the watercolours.

Some of them deal with a harsh reality that never appears in the paintings. This is particularly true of the grim photographs of the devastation caused by mining and milling in the Coromandel.

Some have historic significance such as photographs taken of soldiers cutting a road through bush near Drury.

One of the best shows the railway cutting and tunnel near the master's house and grammar school where Kinder ruled with such a sense of High Church importance.

This is a singularly important show, beautifully mounted with all the appropriate scholarly accompaniments. The discovery of Kinder's work put a floor under the study of the history of art in New Zealand, and his work would not have achieved that importance here if it did not transcend its limitations of time, place and attitudes.