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Charles Heaphy was only nineteen when he was appointed as artist to the New Zealand Company’s expedition that sailed from England in May 1839 to select and purchase from Maori owners land in New Zealand suitable for British settlement. The company’s schemes required a steady flow of migrants with the capital and enterprise needed to develop its vision of a ‘New Britain’, and a sophisticated marketing strategy was used to attract them. Attractive images of the New Zealand landscape and the company’s new settlements were vital ingredients in the campaign to encourage appropriate settlers and land purchasers.
Despite his youth, Heaphy was well suited for the role of company artist. His father, Thomas Heaphy, was a prominent watercolorist; Charles himself had attended lectures at the Royal Academy in London and had worked as a draughtsman for a railway construction firm. He had the accurate topographical eye and the artistic skills needed to produce the persuasive and attractive images the company needed.
The work in Te Papa’s collection is a preliminary study for Heaphy’s well-known watercolour of the same year, View of a part of the town of Wellington, New Zealand, looking towards the south-east, comprising about one-third of the water-frontage… (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington). The artist’s viewpoint is from Clay Point, above the junction of Lambton Quay and Willis Street. The shoreline and much of the harbour that he depicts have long been buried by reclamations, although contemporary viewers will recognise the lines of Lambton Quay and Wakefield Street. By the time Heaphy completed View of a part of the town of Wellington- in September 1841, the settlement was suffering from inadequate capital investment and poor access to farming land. But both Wellington Harbour, New Zealand and his finished work depict a pretty little settlement, with a busy harbour, a general air of picturesque prosperity, and surrounding hills that are decidedly less rugged than they are in reality. The only elements that might have seemed alien to viewers in Britain are the beached waka, or canoes, in the foreground.
Michael Fitzgerald
This essay originally appeared in Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2009).
This extract originally appeared in Te Ata o Tū The Shadow of Tūmatauenga: The New Zealand Wars Collections of Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2024) on page 48.
This extract was authored by Matiu Baker and Rebecca Rice.
In January 1840 the New Zealand Company’s first settler ships arrived in Port Nicholson to establish a settlement at Pito-one (Petone), but heavy flooding forced them to move across the harbour to Pipitea and Te Aro, where downtown Wellington city stands today. This created further tensions as the harbourside residences, plantations and tribal lands of many of the region’s independent rangatira came under pressure from settlers. By the end of that first year alone, around 1200 immigrants had settled in Port Nicholson.1
Heaphy’s view of the settlement, made in 1841, was one of several he made that were reproduced as lithographs and circulated in Britain by the New Zealand Company to promote immigration. Here, he pictures the beginnings of an organised little town, with boats in the harbour, buildings lining the shore, and fields extending into the hills beyond. The presence of waka pulled up on the beach suggests an easy coexistence of Māori and Pākehā.
In truth, controversy abounded. As early as September 1841 the Crown colony government was investigating the New Zealand Company, and in mid-1842 William Spain was appointed land claims commissioner to sort out the problematic company purchases that had been transacted prior to the signing of the Treaty.
1 ‘European settlers arrive in Wellington’, New Zealand History (nzhistory.govt.nz/wellington-anniversary-day, accessed 21 August 2023). In November 1840, the directors of the NZC wrote that it was their desire that the settlement at Port Nicholson be named after the Duke of Wellington.