Painting the Frontier – The Art of New Zealand's Pioneers

by David Filer, David Bateman, $49.95.

A new book about colonial New Zealand is a portrait of 19th-century life. Diana Dekker reports.

Botanists, preachers, soldiers, farmers and prime ministers – plus a few ne'er-do-wells – took to painting on the side in colonial times.

At least three 19th-century prime ministers found the time to picture their environments in more detail than any modern leader with a fancy camera. David Filer, historian and author of Painting the Frontier, marvels that they could and did.

"William Fox really knew how to create a painting. He painted between being a journalist, a lawyer, a farmer and a politician. Maybe they didn't have to be so busy in their other lives, but they were quite rounded compared with politicians in the 20th century."

Fox was prime minister three times, beginning in 1856. Filer includes a watercolour Fox did in 1860 of the dramatic garden at Westoe, the Fox homestead in the Rangitikei district.

Frederick Aloysius Weld, briefly prime minister in the 1860s, was "a total amateur", Filer says. Weld had come to New Zealand to develop a farm and got into politics. "He arrived as a lawyer, became a journalist and then worked as the New Zealand Company's agent in Nelson." He recorded his travels, and Filer includes a watercolour of an expedition up the Wairau River in 1855, when Weld was looking for a quicker route between Nelson and Canterbury.

A cartoon of a drunken politician being arrested on a night out in Auckland is the work of Alfred Domett, an early Nelson settler and prime minister for 15 months from 1862-63. Filer surmises that the MP with the dented hat between two burly policeman is possibly a self-portrait.

"I think what happened in England in the 19th century was that many middle-class men were taught to draw as part of their education, and some who enjoyed it continued throughout their lives."

The most rounded of the colonial multitasker artists was Charles Heaphy. "He came to New Zealand as a draughtsman for the New Zealand Company and became famous for his landscapes, but was equally good at portraits.

"It was a new society, and for him and other people it was easier to jump from one profession to another. The world was being made around them and their work wasn't so onerous."

One of the best farmer-artists was Alfred John Cooper, an early settler at Mohaka, Hawke's Bay, killed in a bloody raid by Te Kooti in 1869.

"He wasn't in the elite circle of politicians and churchmen. He was basically a farmer who did good paintings.

"A lot of them were not in the public eye. They were just farmers and small-town people who just loved painting. Most of them were talented but totally unknown."

There were far fewer women painters, and there are few in his book because their subjects were usually flowers and landscapes, not images related to human activity. Women, he muses, may have been too busy to spend time painting.

However, the most famous artist whose work he selected is Frances Hodgkins, best known for her 20th-century works. Around 1890, she painted three exquisite studies of the family maid at work in Dunedin.

The catalyst for the book was a painting of a sleeping soldier being looked over by a Maori woman, clearly his lover. The artist is unknown. It comes, like nearly all of the 170 images, from the Alexander Turnbull Library.

"It's unusual. There are not a lot of paintings in New Zealand showing lovers. Perhaps, unlike the French, we were reluctant about showing that side of life. It doesn't fit the usual presentation of a soldier."

The book includes two early works by a Maori artist, name unknown, probably done in the second half of the 19th century, of a meeting between hostile tribes at Parawera Pa in the Waipa district.

There are several images illustrating Maori life in the first two decades of Wellington settlement, including Charles Emilius Gold's watercolour, probably done in the early 1850s, of a Maori with facial moko on the southern side of Wellington Harbour.

"The book is a mixture of art, history and biography. It's an emotional reaction to it that counts."

- © Fairfax NZ News