With the growing professionalism of painting in late nineteenth-century New Zealand, aspiring artists were advised which subjects were considered worthy of their contemplation. Unsurprisingly, the local landscape predominated. Such counsel was offered intermittently until the mid-1900s, since when—and with perhaps one notable exception—artists have enjoyed relative freedom in terms of deciding what to paint.
In the first instance, the earliest images produced by Europeans in this country were intended as records. The best known of several by draughtsman Isaac Gilsemans on Abel Tasman's visit in 1642, the deadly confrontation between local Māori and Dutch crew members in present-day Golden Bay, has been described as ‘crudely drawn’ and with ‘a fine disdain for the rules of perspective’.1 Even so, and despite his unfamiliarity with Māori physiognomy and culture, Gilsemans did capture distinctive features such as the wearing of topknots, the ovoid hoe (paddles), and the notching of sternposts on a double-hulled canoe.
Another 127 years elapsed before the next recorded encounter between European and Māori, which took place on the first of Cook's three voyages to the Pacific. Those explorations were a hallmark of the European Enlightenment, reflecting the rise of rational science and, in the words of historian Tzvetan Todorov, the ‘discovery of the foreignness of others’ and ‘recognition of the plurality of the human species’.2 Although primarily scientific, each voyage included at least one official artist: Sydney Parkinson and (briefly) Alexander Buchan (on the Endeavour, 1768–1771), William Hodges (Resolution and Adventure, 1772–1774) and John Webber (Resolution, 1776–1780). And while facing previously unseen subjects, these artists could allow their otherwise objective records to be suffused by the prevailing European taste for the romantic.
Inevitably, such voyages revealed details of natural resources and raised the prospects of European settlement. Subsequently, in the early colonial environment of New Zealand there was, in the words of Michael Dunn, ‘little room for art’, with other activities necessarily taking precedence. What was produced, by amateurs, was mostly topographical, descriptive and picturesque. Beginning in the 1870s, art societies were established in the main centres, and an influential figure in this regard was Dunedin solicitor and watercolourist William Mathew Hodgkins. As well as being a founding member of the Otago Art Society (in 1876), organiser of Dunedin's first art gallery (1887)
