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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.
This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024) on pages 62-64.
This extract was authored by Matiu Baker.
This civic portrait was commissioned by public subscription in 1857 to memorialise the appointment of Dr Isaac Featherston as Wellington’s first provincial superintendent.1 The commission of 100 guineas was awarded to professional portrait painter William Beetham, recently arrived from England. The portrait was controversial from the outset, with some remarking that ‘the pretentious nature of portraiture was inappropriate for the New World’,2 while others thought that notable personalities instrumental in establishing the settlement of Wellington, such as Colonel William Wakefield, or the ‘noble-minded, true-hearted, and faithful’ Hōniana Te Puni, might also be memorialised by the artist.3
At over two-and-a-half metres in height, the painting is grand in scale. The final composition arranges Featherston foremost in the frame with the aging Te Puni and the middle-aged, well-attired Wī Tako (Wiremu Tako Ngātata) in the background. The scene is laden with symbolic imagery, from the rolled survey maps, folded land deeds and ledgers that allude to the weighty responsibility of official office to the superintendent’s large red leather chair. Featherston is the central focus of the painting, standing slightly aloof from his companions – a dominant symbol of provincial authority.
It is a carefully constructed picture of benign colonial rule. Art historian Roger Blackley notes that ‘while Beetham may have been a friend of Featherston, there is a satirical swagger to the superintendent’s pose’.4
The quietly spoken Featherston is said to have displayed ‘a concentrated exertion of energy, courage and boldness’ in his political life.5 Though he was troubled by constant, sometimes debilitating, illness, that boldness drove Featherston to accompany Major-General Chute during the 1865–66 west coast Taranaki campaign. He led a Māori contingent in several engagements, and distinguished himself at Ōtapawa, for which he was awarded the New Zealand Cross for bravery, a detail that was later added to the painting.6
In spite of the esteem in which Featherston was held by Māori, Walter Buller asserts that it was Featherston who coined what Blackley has described as ‘the most repellent of colonial metaphors’: ‘The Maoris 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.’7
1 Jane Vial, Te Rū: Movers and Shakers: Early New Zealand portraits by William Beetham, 27 June–8 September 2013 (New Zealand Portrait Gallery, Wellington), p. 14.
2 Ibid.
3 Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, 11 April 1857, p. 4.
4 Roger Blackley, ‘Dr. Featherstone and the Maori chiefs, Wi Tako and Te Puni’, in William McAloon (ed.), Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, Wellington, 2009), p. 76.
5 David Hamer, ‘Featherston, Isaac Earl’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography [1990], Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand (teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/1f4/featherston-isaac-earl, accessed 10 December 2020).
6 Ibid.
7 Blackley, ‘Dr. Featherstone and the Maori chiefs’.