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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
The title on the drawing of this particularly fierce-looking Māori man suggests Uié was a New Zealand chief. The artist, Jacques Arago, never came to New Zealand. But he sailed under Captain Louis de Freycinet aboard the Uranie between 1817 and 1820, and was in Sydney for five weeks in November–December 1819, at the same time as a small group of Māori from the Bay of Islands was visiting New South Wales.
Arago was a skilled artist and printmaker, able to create convincing likenesses and to draw the human figure well. He also wrote vividly, casting himself in heroic roles, many of them based on his adventures abroad. Even after he became blind in 1837 Arago continued to travel widely, including to Rio de Janeiro, where he died in 1855.
In his 1839 book, Souvenirs d’un aveugle; voyage autour du monde (Memoirs of a blind man; voyage around the world), Arago devotes a chapter to a vivid and largely fictional description of his encounter with a New Zealand chief he had noticed walking around Sydney. The illustrations in two editions of the book, while differing in their pose from this drawing, show the same distinctive shoulder-length hair, full facial moko, few clothes and a fine physique.
In Arago’s account, he one day follows the chief beyond the town to the bush. The chief is armed with a patu (flat club) and axe, Arago with his sketchbook and a brace of pistols. The chief, aware that he is being followed, turns on Arago, who holds him off, makes peace with him, persuades him to pose for a drawing, then supposedly observes him killing an Aboriginal man in an unprovoked attack. He names him as Bahabé, perhaps a name like Tahape. Uié may be closer to his subject’s real name, since the drawing is likely to be an on-the-spot portrait, not one drawn twenty years after the event specifically for publication in the book.
Marian Minson