The first New Zealander to win the Victoria Cross, the first Pakeha to explore the West Coast of the South Island and New Zealand’s most distinguished nineteenth-century landscape painter: by any measure, Charles Heaphy was a central figure in colonial New Zealand - and one of the most multi-faceted. In this engaging book, lavishly illustrated with Charles Heaphy’s paintings, drawings and maps, Sharp reveals the story of Heaphy’s art and life.
From his earliest surviving watercolour of birdlife in the Marlborough Sounds in August 1839 to his last known sketch, drawn on the back of an envelope, showing Maori witnesses at a hearing of the Native Land Court in Palmerston North in December 1879, Charles Heaphy’s paintings and drawings are a visual diary of life in settler New Zealand. However, for many years his life was unsettled as he knocked about nineteenth-century New Zealand. Heaphy was there for the establishment of Wellington, the aftermath of the Wairau affray, the Coromandel gold-rush and the post-war apportioning of the Waikato. He travelled the country for 42 years from Northland to the Chathams, Fiordland to White Island, but died in Brisbane on 3 August 1881.
Sharp has scoured archives and assembled more than eighty paintings, drawings, sketches, cartoons and maps by Heaphy. These include Heaphy’s best-known Mt Egmont from the southward and Kauri forest, Wairoa River, Kaipara but also less well-known works: the evocatively captioned Contentment! Whangape Lake. Taking it easy; the humorous four-part series How we went to the diggings and what we did there (which includes a sketch of Heaphy himself labelled ‘Ye Gold Commissioner speculateth on ye amount of ye licence fees’); and the delightful painting of ‘women shooting’ on Kawau Island in 1853. The works are without parallel in their evocative richness and have been a prototype for New Zealand art from Colin McCahon to Bill Hammond.
Iain Sharp draws on newspapers, diaries and letters of the period as well as on the visual record to reveal the story of Heaphy’s life. He depicts a man who embodied the contradictions of Pakeha life in New Zealand; a man who played many roles (among them advertiser, magistrate, marble expert, dog-lover, MP, husband, gardener, inveterate joiner of clubs and coroner). Simultaneously ambitious and servile, duplicitous and honourable, romantic and opportunistic, Heaphy was able to shoot a wild pig one day and discourse to a scholarly audience the next. He constantly sought European recognition but became almost as familiar with the New Zealand back country as his Maori companions - and his paintings, for all their marketing guile, always convey an authentic sense of wonder.
In charting the course of Heaphy’s extraordinary life as artist, explorer, surveyor and soldier, Sharp tells us much about the culture and history of New Zealand.
Author Biography
Iain Sharp is a distinguished scholar, poet and critic who emigrated to New Zealand from Scotland at the age of seven. After completing a PhD at The University of Auckland on Jacobean comedy, he has worked as books editor at the Sunday Star-Times, fiction editor of Landfall and manuscripts librarian at Auckland City Libraries. Sharp is a frequent reviewer and the author of Real Gold (Auckland University Press, 2007) as well as a number of poetry collections.
