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This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
William Beetham’s life-sized group portrait depicts Isaac Featherston, superintendent of the Wellington province, in the company of Te Āti Awa rangatira, or chiefs, Honiana Te Puni and Wī Tako Ngātata. Beetham places Featherston centre stage, with one hand resting on a decidedly messy desk. Behind the chair stand the bearded Te Puni and his younger relative, Wī Tako.
In 1857 Wellington mounted a public subscription for an imposing portrait of Superintendent Featherston to hang within the handsome new provincial council chambers. Among Wellington’s recent settlers was the painter William Beetham, a professional artist who had exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, London, before emigrating in 1855. As a member of the city’s elite, Beetham became a personal friend of Featherston, and through his residence and land acquisitions in the Hutt was acquainted with the Te Āti Awa sponsors of the Pākehā settlement. It seems that it was Beetham’s initiative to include the Māori chiefs within the portrait, thereby transforming the political ramifications of the work.
Te Puni and Wī Tako came with the Te Āti Awa migration from Taranaki to Whanganui-a-Tara (Wellington) in 1832. The sometimes precarious relationship that Te Āti Awa had with neighbouring tribes was an element in the warm welcome they accorded to the Pākehā settlers, and Wī Tako Ngātata used his considerable diplomatic skills to further the interests of his people in their interactions with the colonists.
While Beetham may have been a friend of Featherston, there is a satirical swagger to the superintendent’s pose. According to Featherston’s son-in-law, Walter Lawry Buller, it was Featherston who coined one of the most repellent of colonial metaphors: ‘The Maoris (he said) are dying out, and nothing can save them. Our plain duty as good, compassionate colonists, is to smooth down their dying pillow. Then history will have nothing to reproach us with.’1 However, Featherston’s renowned powers of diplomacy were invaluable in facilitating the acquisition of Māori land.
Brian Easton remarked on how Beetham had magnified the diminutive Featherston at the expense of the rangatira who are literally pushed into the background.2 Regardless of the imbalance of representation, the remarkable attribute of Beetham’s group portrait is the inclusion of important Māori leaders in the depiction of a colonial leader, commemorating the crucial Māori support that permitted settlement at Port Nicholson.
Roger Blackley
1 Cited in ‘Wellington Philosophical Society: Address by the president’, Transactions and proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, vol. 17, 1885, p. 444. (Buller’s italics.)
2 Brian Easton, ‘William Beetham’s portrait of Dr Isaac Featherston with the Maori Chiefs Wi Tako and Te Puni’, Bulletin of New Zealand Art History, vol. 12, 1991, pp. 29–34.
Text originally created for Tūrangawaewae: Art and New Zealand exhibition at Te Papa, March 2018.
Colonial power dynamics are at play in this life-sized group portrait.
Dr Isaac Featherston – the first elected head of Wellington province – poses with a swagger. With him are Te Āti Awa iwi [tribe] leaders Honiana Te Puni (left) and Wī Tako Ngātata (right).
The placement of the Māori leaders in the painting’s background jars today. Even so, it is significant that they were included in an official portrait of a colonial politician – in Wellington’s early years, Pākehā settlers were dependent on Te Āti Awa’s support.
He maha ngā āhuatanga pēhi mana i tēnei kōwaiwai kiritangata.
Anei a Dr Isaac Featherston – te tangata tuatahi i tohua hei upoko mō Pōneke. Kei ōna taha a Honiana Te Puni (mauī), he rangatira nō Te Ātiawa, me Wī Tako Ngātata (matau).
He mārama te kite atu i ēnei rā he mea whakaiti te whakanohonga o ngā rangatira Māori ki te tuarongo o te kōwaiwai. Tērā tērā, he mea nui i whai wāhi ai rāua ki te kōwaiwai kiritangata ōkawa o tētahi kaitōrangapū Pākehā – i ngā tau mātāmua o Pōneke, i whakawhirinaki atu ngā Pākehā ki a Te Āti Awa.