Title / object name The emigrants
| Maker | Role | Date |
| Allsworth, William | painter | 1844 |
Medium Summary oil on canvas
Materials oil paint, canvas
| Dimensions |
| Image | 890 (Height) x 1210 (Width) x mm |
| Frame | 1035 (Height) x 1350 (Width) x 35 (Depth) mm |
Classification paintings, group portraits
Registration Number 1992-0022-1
Credit LinePurchased 1992 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds
This work by the English artist William Allsworth became known as the definitive depiction of nineteenth-century Scottish emigration to New Zealand thanks largely to its publication as a lithograph by Day & Haghe in London around 1855. It shows a prosperous Scottish family in a Highland landscape, surrounded by their worldly goods — piles of luggage, animals, cases of trees and plants, and farm implements. Clearly, they are emigrating, with everything needed for successful colonial life.
Their destination is signalled by the ship anchored just offshore. Close inspection reveals that it is flying the 1835 New Zealand flag. The family’s Scottishness is loudly proclaimed by the wearing of tartan: they are the Mackays, gathered near their ancestral home in Sutherlandshire, and it is their chartered ship, the Slains Castle, that rides at anchor in the background.
But not everything in the painting is as it seems. A family named Mackay did arrive at Nelson on the Slains Castle in January 1845, but recent research by descendants has revealed that their real name was Mackie, and that their father, James, was not the brother of a Sutherlandshire laird he claimed to be, but the second son of a merchant in Aberdeen. Furthermore, he had spent most of his life in London, where he worked as a banker. He married an English woman and the children were all London born. And the Slains Castle was not chartered by the family — nor did it sail from Scotland. It was a New Zealand Company ship that sailed from Plymouth in October 1844 with several other passengers besides the ‘Mackays’.
It is possible that James Mackie embellished his family history because emigration to such a distant destination as New Zealand gave him the opportunity to make a new start with a fabricated noble identity. Commissioning Allsworth to construct an appropriate image — he had exhibited ten paintings at the Royal Academy, London, between 1836 and 1856, all but one of which appear to have been portraits — might have been a key step in establishing the family’s new legend.
Michael Fitzgerald
This essay appears in Art at Te Papa, (Te Papa Press, 2009)