Gottfried Lindauer

Biography

Lindauer painted the portrait of Ana Rupene, a Māori woman with a sleeping child on her back, about thirty times. Demand for it never dried up, and in his later years, when his manner was going out of fashion, the old compositions went on bringing in an income.

He was born on 5 January 1839 in Plzeň (Pilsen), in Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire, and his name was Bohumír. His father, Ignatz Lindauer, was a gardener, and his first drawings were of plants and trees. In 1855 he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he studied under Leopold Kupelwieser and Joseph von Führich, painters of religious subjects. To make his way in the market more easily, he replaced the name Bohumír with its German equivalent, Gottfried. Back in Plzeň, he worked for churches: he painted religious compositions and frescoes and made portraits of prominent townspeople, among them Bishop Jan Valerián Jirsík. Eighteen months later he left for Moravia for three years. He may also have travelled to Galicia and Russia on commissions for church decoration, but I have not been able to verify this.

To avoid being drafted into the Austrian army, he went to Germany in 1873, and the following year sailed for New Zealand. The ship reached Wellington on 6 August 1874. The years that followed are described in different ways: by some accounts he first lived in Nelson and worked as a photographer, then moved to Auckland, where he was noticed by the businessman Henry Partridge, who was interested in preserving Māori culture. By the same accounts, Lindauer’s first exhibition took place in Wellington in 1877. In 1881 he took New Zealand citizenship.

The Māori became his main subject. Chiefs commissioned portraits from him, and the canvases record facial tattoos, clothing, ornaments and weapons with rare thoroughness. He made a special study of Māori life at home and painted scenes from it. In 1886, at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, Sir Walter Buller showed a series of his life-size portraits of chiefs and warriors. The Prince of Wales so admired a picture of a young poi dancer without a facial tattoo that Buller gave it to him. It seems to me that this precision of detail is what makes his canvases valuable as evidence, although as painting they were judged with reserve.

In 1886–1887 Lindauer visited his native land and returned to New Zealand. He married Rebecca, the daughter of Benjamin Prance Petty, and settled in Woodville, near Wellington. They had two sons, Hector and Victor; Victor became a teacher and a phycologist (a specialist in algae). By some accounts, in 1904 his works were shown at the World’s Fair in St. Louis and won an award, and in 1907 and again in 1911–1914 he was back in Europe. In 1916, because of failing eyesight, he stopped painting.

Lindauer died on 13 June 1926 in Woodville and was buried in the Old Gorge cemetery. In 2014–2015 the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin showed his portraits of Māori, and the exhibition required the consent of the descendants of the people portrayed. There is a bust of the artist in Woodville, and his portrait of Paratene Te Manu is on the cover of Paula Morris’s novel “Rangatira”.