Māori Portraits: Gottfried Lindauer's New Zealand

Exhibition Website

Sep 9 2017 - Apr 1 2018

Come face to face with the leading Māori protagonists of nineteenth-century New Zealand (Aotearoa) in a series of arresting images by the country’s most prolific portrait painter, Gottfried Lindauer. These paintings, revered embodiments of Māori ancestors, document a fascinating and tumultuous era of cross-cultural interactions.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.  

The companion volume, Gottfried Lindauer's New Zealand: The Maori Portraits, follows the Bohemian immigrant artist Gottfried Lindauer from the 1870s to the early twentieth century. Lindauer travelled to marae and rural towns around New Zealand and – commissioned by Maori and Pakeha – captured in paint the images of key Maori figures. For Maori then and now, the faces of tupuna 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 Maori and Pakeha 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 Maori visited to see their ancestors; and the afterlife of the paintings in marae and memory. 

To add this book to your library, click here: Gottfried Lindauer's New Zealand: The Maori Portraits       

  • Painting
  • Indigenous
  • 19th Century
  • Portrait
  • Oceanic (Australia, Melanesia, New Zealand, and Polynesia)
  • Gottfried Lindauer

Exhibition Venues & Dates