ABSTRACT
One of the most successful artists (perhaps the most successful) in New Zealand from the mid 1980s into the 1990s-successful in terms of market value and sales, attention from leading art galleries and museums, popular esteem, and space and time devoted to his work and career by the media, both print and electronic-is a painter, who died in Australia in 1947. That is C.F.Goldie, born in Auckland in 1870, trained in Paris, 1893-7, at the Academie Julian, at which the prestigious Academic painter, Bouguereau, had taught. From around 1900 Goldie specialized for the rest of his life in oil paintings of Maori-mostly single-figure studies of elderly models, in both Maori and European dress, resigned, melancholic or sleepy-looking, their physical appearance and accompanying artefacts meticulously detailed, and equipped with titles such as Memories, One of the Old School, The Last of the Chivalrous Days, A Noble Relic of a Noble Race. These paintings were anecdotal or narrative pictures, rather than portraits (Bell, 1980:70-93; 1991:88-92). They visualized, as the titles suggest, a past and a present that was largely a European invention; not just Goldie’s, but one that had strong currency in late colonial culture generally-the notion of the ‘passing’ or the dying of the ‘old time Maori’ (Bell, 1980; 1992); at a time, it ought to be noted, when the Maori population was in fact rising, and many Maori, both individually and collectively, were resisting further colonialist encroachments on their remaining lands and cultural autonomy (Pool, 1977; Williams, 1969; Walker, 1990).
