Miss Jenkins

The precise identity of ‘Miss Jenkins’, the name inscribed on the back of this studio portrait photograph, remains uncertain, probably compounded by being long misread as ‘Mrs Jenkins’. The sitter’s father was almost certainly the intrepid first-generation migrant William Jenkins (1813–1902), known as ‘Bill the Steward’, who was successively a sailor, whaler, accommodation-house keeper, farmer, market gardener, horse-trainer and jockey.

His first marriage was to Pairoke, daughter of a Te Āti Awa chief, who tragically died in childbirth in 1853. By process of elimination, the Miss Jenkins in this photograph is probably one of four daughters from the union (a fifth died early and a sixth would have been too young for this photograph): Mary, Ellen, Jane or Henrietta. In later life, the sisters became well-known Wellington hoteliers and a force to be reckoned with in local business circles.

The portrait radiates middle-class respectability — indeed Victorian moral purity. Its oval framing lends it a ‘fine art’ aura, and it follows the format of Franz Xaver Winterhalter’s luscious 1843 portrait of the young Queen Victoria (Royal Collection Trust). Miss Jenkins looks pensive, slightly wistful and demurely beautiful in her smart dark coat, checked dress, choker necklace and floral pendant. The photograph is in the format of a carte-de-visite, a standard-sized commercial portrait, designed to fit into albums which might also contain photographs of other family members, friends and celebrities
of the times.

The words ‘half Caste’ are also inscribed on the back. While this pigeonholes Miss Jenkins’ ethnicity, it has almost certainly been added by someone outside her immediate family and in a later era. Historian Damon Salesa has argued that such labelling was alien to Māori understandings of whakapapa (genealogical architecture) and that people like Miss Jenkins operated proudly and successfully without considering their parentage.1

The photographer, Edward Smallwood Richards, enjoyed critical favour over his rivals, Swan & Wrigglesworth, at the New Zealand International Exhibition in Dunedin in 1865. The firm of Batt & Richards went on to do thriving business on Lambton Quay, Wellington between 1867 and 1874, with a successful line in Māori sitters, whether posed in traditional costumes or, as here, impeccably Western in their dress and demeanour.

Lissa Mitchell, Matiu Baker, Mark Stocker

1 Damon Salesa, Racial crossings: Race, intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011.