18th Century and 19th Century New Zealand Art

The first European artists to depict Aotearoa New Zealand and its inhabitants, the Māori, were professional artists attached to the earliest voyages of discovery to the Pacific. Foreshadowing Europe's massive colonial project, these ventures were underpinned by a rapidly developing scientific establishment bent on recording and classifying the world as it was revealed through exploration.

On James Cook's two great voyages of the late 18th century, artists Sidney Parkinson and William Hodges performed a primarily scientific recording role. (Photography, of course, was not invented until 1839). The aesthetic value that we appreciate in their work was, in their time, incidental to the priorities of observation and accurate recording of visual 'facts'. We should remember that these voyages to the other side of the globe were literally into the unknown. Artists were often drawing sights, customs and objects that were utterly strange to them. It is little wonder then, that, despite their efforts at accuracy, their images were often curious hybrids of what was before their eyes and what was in their heads - their cultural baggage.

Fifty-odd years later the first missionaries and settlers must also have been amazed by what they found here. After all, the settlers had been led to believe by the New Zealand Company (which had acquired land from Māori to resell to settlers) that New Zealand was a kind of earthly paradise - pastoral, empty and benign. Hadn't the settlers seen with their own eyes, before embarking, the idyllic images sent from the antipodes by English artists? The settlers may have thought twice if they had realised that these artists were commissioned by the New Zealand Company. The distortions in these images were not so much a matter of cultural baggage getting in the way, as the 'hard sell'.

Some of the most affecting and honest images of early colonial art can be found in the diaries and letters of the first settlers as they came to grips with survival in the actual place, as opposed to the romantic fantasy they had 'bought'. These images lack the refinement found in the works of professional artists like Augustus Earle and George French Angas, but they are alive with the texture of experience.

Most of New Zealand's early artists were amateurs. Many were surveyors or engineers. Two of the best - William Fox and James Richmond - were politicians. It is amazing to think that with all the time and energy required in the settling and clearing of land, the building of towns, dealing with worsening conflicts with Māori - in short, the whole colonial project - that so much art was produced.

In the face of an often harsh reality, the persistence in art of a Romantic and idealised image of the New Zealand colony and its landscape, suggests not only a determination to retain the 'civilized' aesthetic values left behind in Europe, but also the psychologically sustaining power of an ideal vision of the future.

Barnett, Gerald. Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century New Zealand Art. Discover: Te Kohanga Taonga, updated June 29 2002 URL: http://discover.natlib.govt.nz