A warm day [Patara Te Tuhi]

This high-quality chromolithographs is a reproduction of a painting by Charles Frederick Goldie, preeminent painter of Māori portraits in the early 20th century. It was produced and distributed around Christmastime in illustrated newspapers such as The Graphic, or the Auckland Weekly News. Examples of this print often framed and hung in pride of place in both Pākehā and Māori households. This print is of particular interest as it has been mounted in a carefully made frame, carved with Māori designs and with inlaid paua that personalise the prints.

This chromolithograph is made directly from a portrait of one of Goldie’s favourite sitters, Patara Te Tuhi, Ngāti Mahuta (original painting in Christchurch Art Gallery https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/collection/69-79/charles-frederick-goldie/a-hot-day-wiremu-patara-te-tuhi-ngati-mahuta). A warm day was made available as a pictorial supplement, a ‘presentation plate’ in the Christmas issue of the Christchurch Weekly Press in 1904. Not only was the painting a work of ‘colonial reputation, but also, according to advertisements it was ‘perfectly reproduced, having received nine printings’ (“New Zealand Illustrated, 1904, Woodville Examiner, 3 October 1904, p. 2). The reproduced portrait became so familiar to New Zealanders that reference was made to it in accounts of Patara Te Tuhi’s death in 1910 (‘Personal’, Auckland Star, 2 July 1910, p. 9), and Goldie reportedly saw two copies hanging over his coffin when he attended Patara’s tangi (Roger Blackley, Goldie, 1997, p. 48). By 1928 the chromolithograph was considered rare.

This is a valuable work not only for who it  pictures and being by Goldie, but also for the way it demonstrates the reproduction and circulation of works of art in the early twentieth century. While, as Blackley acknowledges, the reproduction of Goldie’s paintings in this way were problematic for the Māori subjects, they were, at the same time, ‘eagerly collected by Māori, placed in meeting houses and displayed at tangi’. (Blackley, p. 48)