Pepepe, Church Missionary, Station (NZ), Residence of Rev B Ashwell

George French Angas was the son of George Fife Angas and Rosetta French, born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, in 1822. His father was chairman of the South Australian Company, and the largest landowner in South Australia in the 1840s. Angas received little artistic education but had a natural interest in natural history and drawing. His father’s business interests in Australia provided the impetus for Angas’s trip to the colonies in 1843. He undertook several expeditions, and in 1844 sailed for New Zealand. There, he travelled from Wellington to the upper South Island, up the east coast of the North Island to Auckland, and through the Waikato to Taupō and the volcanic plateau. He documented his journey in drawings, watercolours and journal writing, all of which served as the basis for later exhibitions and publications, including Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand (1847) and The New Zealanders Illustrated (1847). In the former, several of Angas’s drawings, including this view, were reproduced as uncoloured lithographs. According to Angas, the aim of the publication was ‘to describe faithfully impressions of savage life and scenes in countries only now emerging from a primitive state of barbarism’. In spite of this strongly colonial perspective, Angas's work does form an important record of early encounters between Māori and European in the 1840s in Aotearoa. The documentary nature of his work, with its interest clothing, building styles and artefacts, adds to our knowledge both of the artist and his times.

This view of Pepepe was made during Angas’s trip from Auckland south through the central North Island from 26 September 1844. According to Angas’s published account, the party setting out for the Waikato River comprised himself and Thomas Forsaith [Protector of Aborigines], with ‘five native boys’, a standard ratio for a mid-nineteenth-century colonial expedition through an unmapped landscape.  One of their destinations was the Church Missionary Society mission at Pepepe, near Taupiri, a sacred maunga overlooking Kaitotehe, a large pā built by Te Wherowhero, the paramount rangatira of the Waikato, whom Angas met and drew.
Following his encounter with Te Wherowhero, Angas continued to the mission station. The mission was established by Benjamin Yates Ashwell of the Church Missionary Society in 1843  and, up until 1863 it was, as described by James Cowan, ‘the centre of religion and secular learning on the mid-Waikato’.  Ashwell became know to Māori as Te Ahiwera, and the mission station he established was much drawn and photographed. It proved a picturesque subject for Angas, who wrote: ‘At a bend of the river, the romantic cottage of the missionary suddenly appeared in view.  It was as lovely and secluded a spot as it is possible to imagine: the little cottage built of raupo, with its white chimneys. And its garden full of flowers – of sweet English flowers, roses, stocks and mignonette – was snugly perched on an elevated plateau overhanging the Waikato: and the access to it was by a small bridge thrown across a glen of fern trees, with a stream murmuring below…The cottage, the situation, the people, and everything around them, were picturesque. Pepepe signifies butterfly: and surely the name is not misapplied to this lovely spot’.

Angas created four versions of this view. The first, in Canberra’s National Library collection, is what Angas scholar, Philip Jones, describes as an uncharacteristic ‘atmospheric’ sketch. Jones considers this version to be a ‘corrected’ version of this preliminary sketch, and ‘probably the most ‘accurate’ in terms of reproducing what was actually there at the time’.  Jones notes ‘He has realised, for example, that the structure on the hill next to the house was probably a tomb fence. He has delineated the people sitting on the distant beach, differentiated the vegetation, added the horse, etc.’ While staying at Pepepe, Angas also made several drawings of local Māori who came to visit, including Te Paki and his wife, Te Amotutu, and several girls who were being educated by Mrs Ashwell at the mission station. These would have served as the basis of the groups of figures inserted into the landscape by Angas, lending ethnographic interest to the scene. There is a watercolour in the Turnbull that serves as the basis of the lithograph published in Savage life and scenes. Either this watercolour, or the one on offer to Te Papa, may have been the version displayed as painting no. 86 in Angas’s Egyptian Hall show in London, which opened in April 1846. This watercolour is both picturesque, but, together with Angas’ narration and other archival sources, also offers an important window onto the cross-cultural engagements (and entanglements) between missionaries and Māori communities in the early years of colonial settlement.