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Text originally created for Tūrangawaewae: Art and New Zealand exhibition at Te Papa, March 2018.
A boy peers intently through a telescope, his eye scrunched.
This painting is not strictly a portrait, but a playful allegory of the sense of sight – a common theme in European paintings of the 1700s. Te Papa has three other paintings in the same series, representing smell, hearing, and taste. Only touch is missing from the set.
E hōmiromiro ana te tama nei ki roto i te paikaraihe, kua kati tētahi o ōna kanohi.
Ehara tēnei i te kōwaiwai kiritangata noa iho, engari e hāngai ana ki ngā āhuatanga mātai anō hoki – he kaupapa i kaha kitea i ngā peitatanga i ngā tau 1700. E toru anō ngā kōwaiwai i tēnei kohinga i roto i Te Papa, ko te rongo ā-ihu, ā-taringa me te rongo ā-waha. Ko te pā noa iho te rongo kua mahue i te kohinga.
Source: Mary Kisler, Angels & Aristocrats: Early European Art in New Zealand Public Collections, Auckland, 2010, pp. 222-223.
Allegorical references to the senses abound in still life paintings, therefore it is not surprising that works specifically on the subject were common... in sets of paintings, each one symbolising a different sense in turn. Wellington owns four from such a set, Sight, Smell, Hearing and Taste... but unfortunately not the fifth work, Touch. The set had obviously been split up, and while the three little girls are in identical period frames, the boy who holds a telescope to his eye has a more contemporary one. The set of four was attributed to the French painter Philippe Mercier (c. 16891760) at a sale in London in 1922, and at the time they were gifted to the National Gallery in Wellington in 1945, but the facial features are more rounded, lacking the heart-shaped outlines and doll-like features which mark Mercier's work. When they were examined by Dr John Ingamells from the Paul Mellon Center for British Art in 1998, he decided that although they were in the vein of Mercier, who painted in both France and England, they were not by his hand. Mercier certainly painted sets of the senses, but those clearly identified as by his hand are groups of adults rather than children.