Portrait of Elizabeth Anne Lassetter

Text originally created for Tūrangawaewae: Art and New Zealand exhibition at Te Papa, March 2018.

A young wife poses with the trappings of middle-class respectability.

Elizabeth Lassetter appears here as the young wife of a Methodist schoolteacher. Though the painting’s style is naive, she is clearly middle class – at the time, you had to be comfortably off to commission such a portrait.

After Elizabeth died in Australia in 1844, two of her daughters married into the Beauchamp family – forebears of New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield and her father Sir Harold Beauchamp, one of Te Papa’s earliest benefactors.

Anei tētahi hoa makau āhua rangatahi tonu nei e mau ana i ngā āhuatanga o te iwi whairawa.

Ko Elizabeth Lassetter tēnei, te hoa makau a tētahi kaiako nō te hāhi Wēteriana. Ahakoa te tāera o te peitatanga, e kitea ana tōna mana – i aua wā, me āhua whai rawa te tangata hei tono i tētahi o ēnei kōwaiwai kiritangata.

I muri mai i te matenga o Elizabeth i Ahitereiria i te tau 1844, tokorua āna tamāhine i mārena ki te whānau Beauchamp – ngā tīpuna o Katherine Mansfield, kaituhi nō Aotearoa, rāua ko tōna pāpā, ko Sir Harold Beauchamp, tētahi o ngā kaitautoko tuatahi o Te Papa.