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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
The young travel artist George French Angas produced more than four hundred watercolour sketches when he travelled by foot over some twelve hundred kilometres, mainly in the North Island, during the spring of 1844. His pictorial ethnography, The New Zealanders illustrated, was published serially in London during 1847, and it is largely by these sixty lithographs that Angas is known in New Zealand. The crudely hand-coloured lithographs are inadequate translations of the watercolours, and reproduce only a selection from his vast pictorial project.
Among the most important of Angas’s images are the portraits, which (together with work by Joseph Merrett) amount to the first national portrait gallery of colonial New Zealand art. Some later photographers and painters encountered reluctance or outright hostility from their prospective portrait subjects, but Angas tells of competitive situations in which ‘all [were] anxious to have their likenesses taken, that they may go to England with those of the Rangatiras [chiefs]’.1
In Savage life and scenes (1847), Angas’s two-volume account of his Australasian experiences, he describes how, soon after arriving in Auckland, he visited the Ngāti Whātua settlement at Ōrākei: ‘On arriving at Orakai, we found Te Kawaw, who was much flattered at the idea of sitting for his portrait. He is a man of advanced years, with a fine intellectual head, from which the hair has retreated, leaving only a small portion on each side of his temples: he wore a kokahu, or coarse garment of strips of black and yellow flax. Kawaw’s son, Maona, and his nephew, Paora, with one of the priests
of Nga ti watua tribe, also stood to me for their portraits.’2
Angas depicts Āpihai Te Kawau in a pākē, or rain cape, sitting alongside his nephew Te Rēwiti, who displays the symbols of rangatiratanga: a korowai (cloak ornamented with thrums), huia feathers in the hair, and bearing a taiaha, or fighting staff. They are positioned to the side of a house at what is now Ōkahu Bay, with the pōhutukawa-lined shore visible on the right. It was Te Kawau who offered land and protection for the settlement of Auckland, which by then had been declared New Zealand’s capital.
Roger Blackley
1 George French Angas, Savage life and scenes in Australia and New Zealand: Being an artist’s impressions of countries and people at the Antipodes, London, 1847, vol. 2, p. 58.
2 Ibid., pp. 290–291.