Te Rauparaha NZ Chiefs

This drawing is an extremely rare portrait of a great rangatira, Te Rauparaha (?- 1849, Ngāti Toa) by one of the most important early European artists to settle in Aotearoa, Charles Heaphy (1820-1881). Heaphy was the son of a professional artist, who began his artistic career as a draughtsman for London and Birmingham Railway Company in 1835. He attended classes at the Royal Academy from 1837 to 1839, when he entered into the service of the New Zealand Company as a draughtsman. He was only 19 years old when he boarded the Tory on the 9 May at Plymouth, destined for Aotearoa New Zealand. They arrived at Ship Cove in Queen Charlotte Sound on 18 August 1839, where Heaphy made his first significant picture of Kākariki. As they travelled around Cook Strait, including visits to Port Nicholson and Kapiti, Heaphy continued making pictures of the peoples and places encountered.

Following the voyage of the Tory around New Zealand, Heaphy continued to be employed by the New Zealand Company as draughtsman and surveyor, producing a large number of watercolour views, many of which were lithographed in London and used as propaganda for promoting immigration. Later, he worked for the New Zealand government in various surveying roles, continuing to produce watercolours and drawings as part of his practice. But, as Michael Fitzgerald writes, the varied demands of Heaphy’s his later career did not allow him to ‘develop the artistic promise of his first years in New Zealand’.  Heaphy was active during the New Zealand wars, charting the Great South Road, and working on surveying the confiscated Waikato lands. In his final years, he worked as a government official under Donald McLean.

Heaphy’s early landscapes, executed with an eye for topographical detail and clarity, have largely defined his place in New Zealand art history. They have come to stand in as an origin story for an art that was uniquely of this place, an art that had thrown off the shackles of inherited British and European modes of representation and developed a confidence in engaging with the local on its own terms. This status was first accorded to Heaphy as Aotearoa neared the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, when E. H. McCormick wrote ‘throughout the range of Heaphy’s work you are aware of a man wrestling with the strange contours and colours of a new environment and, moreover, attempting to define the peculiar quality of each part of New Zealand, as he visited it in turn’. 

Heaphy is best known for his landscapes, but also made a small number of portraits as he travelled around the country on the Tory during his first year in Aotearoa, from 1839-1840. These are important, as they provide a visual record of early encounters between Māori and Pākehā during a significant moment in the colonisation of Aotearoa, as representatives of the New Zealand Company were negotiating the acquisition of land from Māori for settlement.

Following the New Zealand Company’s Port Nicholson purchase in present-day Wellington in September 1839, the Tory travelled to at the Ngāti Toa stronghold of Kapiti Island. They arrived on 17 October 1839, one day after the much-anticipated Kūititanga, the last major intertribal battle in the lower North Island, fought between Te Āti Awa and Ngāti Raukawa on Waikanae beach. The Tory remained at anchor off Kapiti for nearly three weeks while the ship’s surgeons attended the wounded from both sides and Wakefield negotiated the Wellington purchase with Ngāti Toa chiefs. Te Rauparaha and other chiefs accepted guns, blankets and other goods for the sale of land, but the extent of purchases was later disputed. Further, when he signed the Treaty at Kapiti in May 1840, Te Rauparaha understood that his signature guaranteed his acquired customary rights to the entire Wellington region through raupatu.

Heaphy’s portrait was likely made while the Tory was anchored off Kāpiti. Edward Jerningham Wakefield, son of Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the mastermind of the New Zealand Company, and part of the Tory crew, noted that Te Rauparaha sat for his portrait on board, and “made a noisy demand for a waistcoat in payment as soon as the sitting was over”. He described Te Rauparaha’s appearance as follows: "Although at least sixty years old, he might have passed for a much younger man, being hale and stout, and his hair but slightly grizzled. His features are aquiline and striking; but an overhanging upper lip, and a retreating forehead, on which his eyebrows wrinkled back when he lifted his deep-sunken eyelids and penetrating eyes, produced a fatal effect on the good prestige arising from his first appearance. The great chieftain, the man able to lead others, and habituated to wield authority, was clear at first sight…"

As a young man, coming face to face with a rangatira of Te Rauparaha’s status must have made an impact on Heaphy, and a sense of his mana is conveyed in this striking, highly competent pencil sketch of his noble visage.

Rebecca Rice, Curator Historical Art, August 2023