Gottfried Lindauer’s New Zealand: The Māori Portraits – Ngahiraka Mason and Zara Stanhope (2016)
For Māori, the faces that look out from Lindauer’s portraits are tribal leaders and family members. They are tohunga and politicians. They are ancestors and friends. Gottfried Lindauer met Māori tūpuna at the most basic level of human connection by capturing their likeness. This book returns the ancestors and the artist to the people.
Publication details
Mason, N. and Z. Stanhope (Eds). Gottfried Lindauer’s New Zealand: The Māori Portraits. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2016.
About the book
From the 1870s to the early twentieth century, the Bohemian immigrant artist Gottfried Lindauer travelled to marae and rural towns around New Zealand and – commissioned by Māori and Pākehā – captured in paint the images of key Māori figures. For Māori then and now, the faces of tūpuna are full of mana and life. Now this definitive book on Lindauer’s portraits of the ancestors collects that work for New Zealanders.
The book presents 67 major portraits and 8 genre paintings alongside detailed accounts of the subject and work, followed by essays by leading scholars that take us inside Lindauer and his world: from his artistic training in Bohemia to his travels around New Zealand as Māori and Pākehā commissioned him to paint portraits; his artistic techniques and deep relationship with photography; Henry Partridge’s gallery of Lindauer works on Queen Street in Auckland where Māori visited to see their ancestors; and the afterlife of the paintings in marae and memory.
Winner, 2017 Museums Australia Multimedia & Publication Design Awards for Exhibition Catalogue (Major).
Further information
This publication is part of the series Te Takarangi: Celebrating Māori publications - a sample list of 150 non-fiction books produced by a partnership between Royal Society Te Apārangi and Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga.