Images of the 'Exotic'? Gottfried Lindauer in the Context of European Portraiture¹

Alexandra Karentzos

Abstract
In 1886, twelve of Gottfried Lindauer’s portraits formed part of the presentation of the British colony New Zealand at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. For the European public, in this context these portraits represented ‘Otherness’, for they were exhibited – and in this way ‘naturalized’ – together with cultural artefacts, members of the indigenous population performing handcrafts, and specimens of nature in greenhouses. The paintings were functionalized into ethnographic-documentary, ‘authentic’ representations of Māori culture. Within this exhibition glorifying colonial power, they were turned into objects displaying British scientific knowledge and prestige. This essay reads Lindauer’s paintings in the context of nineteenth-century European portraiture, a genre where exotic colonial goods and plants were appropriated as luxury items. The resultant constellation marked by exoticizing self-representation in Europe and exoticizing representation of ‘indigenous’ Others reveals the uniqueness of Lindauer’s work, which defies such a schematic classification of exoticization: the portraits were in part commissioned by Māori who wished a pictorial representation of themselves or their relatives. By presenting the Māori nobly as large-sized figures in the portrait genre, Lindauer’s paintings simultaneously offer the scope for various readings.

Introduction

[1] The 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London presented the flora of New Zealand in one of its greenhouses, and among it's 5.5 million visitors² was Gottfried Lindauer (1839–1926) himself (fig. 1).³ An image from the Illustrated London News shows the visitors to the exhibition dressed in the London fashion of the time as they explore nature in the setting created. Twelve of Lindauer’s portraits formed part of this presentation of the British colony. In what follows, I would like to examine various facets of such contextualising of Lindauer's painting in Europe: proceeding from the phenomenon of an exoticisation in European portraiture, I will go on to examine the exoticisation of Lindauer’s portraits in Europe more closely.

1 The Colonial and Indian Exhibition: The Fernery in the New Zealand Court, in: The Illustrated London News, 26 June 1886 (reprod. from: Alexandra Karentzos, “Bilder des ‘Exotischen′. Gottfried Lindauer im Kontext europäischer Portraitmalerei”, in: Gottfried Lindauer – Die Māori-Portraits, eds. Udo Kittelmann and Britta Schmitz, Cologne 2014, 176-185: 176)

In the Palm House – Exoticism in Europe

[2] “[…] we associate with each vegetable form the wonders of a distant land; we hear the rustling of the fan-like leaves […]. So great is the charm which reality can give.”⁴ In his Kosmos (1845–1862), Alexander von Humboldt describes the perfect illusion of the tropics offered by a palm house where the artificial world becomes reality for visitors. The exotic hence becomes the familiar. In Édouard Manet’s famous 1878/79 portrait of M. and Mme. Guillemet, In the Conservatory, which hangs in the Berlin Alte Nationalgalerie, the owners of a fashion house present themselves urbanely in a palm garden (fig. 2). The plant pots in the painting reveal the artificiality of the ‘natural’ interior. The deep green of the plants, with its copious shadings, forms the background to the picture, against which the figures stand out.

2 Édouard Manet, In the Conservatory, 1878/79, oil on canvas, 115 × 150 cm. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (reprod. from: Karentzos, “Bilder des ‘Exotischen′. Gottfried Lindauer im Kontext europäischer Portraitmalerei”, 176)

[3] The greenhouse represents “a refuge for exotic musings”⁵. The Viennese poet Felix Dörmann describes a couple in the glasshouse's “moist air” yearning for distant climes⁶ in his 1892 poem, “In the Palm House”, which is reminiscent of Manet's Impressionist picture. In the painting, Madame Guillemet's face merges, as it were, with the exotic flowers, the delicate pink blossoms find themselves reflected in the similarly coloured cheeks and the mouth, the greenblue eyes correspond with the green and the blue of the plants, and the dress carefully fanned out on the bench relates to the fan palms in the background. Sigrid Weigel points out in general terms that the discourse about foreignness and that about femininity are both based on structurally analogous concepts.⁷

[4] In Manet's painting, nineteenth-century colonialism figures via the colonial produce on display: the plants as well as the cigar in the man's hand and the gold rings on the couple's fingers, together with the woman's gold bracelet, indicate the luxuries of the exotic. This picture thus belongs to the same nineteenth-century colonial context as the display of New Zealand's flora at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London. The German commentator, Julius Lessing, focused his attention above all on the luxury presented in this exhibition: “What moves us most remarkably in most colonies is the confrontation of primordial barbarity and a colossal excess of unprocessed raw materials with individual products from sophisticated luxury industries.”⁸

[5] In the nineteenth century, the predilection for everything exotic is also reflected in the furnishing of bourgeois apartments: “The winter garden, integrated into the architecture of a villa, became the high point of exotic interior decoration.”⁹ A winter garden appears as a microcosm of the distant exotic in your own house. In the decoration of the studio of the Viennese painter Hans Makart, the theatricality of the exotic culminated in a historicist and eclectic collection of palms, ostrich eggs and feathers, into which the paintings with exoticising subjects fitted very well, such as the portraits of Charlotte Wolters as Cleopatra (fig. 3). “The palm, the most obvious symbol and cliché of exotic yearning, became a standard requisite in bourgeois apartments.”¹⁰ Life in overseas colonies, above all those of the British Empire, provided material for exotic fantasies.¹¹ In his two paintings of the palm house on the Peacocks' Island (Pfaueninsel) near Potsdam, Karl Blechen boosts the exoticism of the space still further by including reclining odalisques, who lend an additional erotic charge to the natural interior (fig. 4).

3 Hans Makarts Künstlerwerkstatt in Wien, Gußhausstraße 25, 1870, wood engraving by Vinzenz Katzler after a photograph by Josef Löwy (© akg-images)

4 Karl Blechen, The Interior of the Palm House, 1832/33, oil on paper, mounted on canvas, 64 × 56 cm. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (reprod. from: Karentzos, “Bilder des ‘Exotischen′. Gottfried Lindauer im Kontext europäischer Portraitmalerei”, 177)

[6] The palm house is seen as a domesticated jungle, as an artificial paradise, conserving under glass that paradise the colonies destroyed.¹² In this way, the nature on display is aestheticised like a work of art. Thus, at the same time, Lindauer's portraiture is naturalized in the Māori pavilion at the 1886 colonial exhibition.

Lindauer's Portraits in the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London

[7] The most interesting portion of the New Zealand collection is, to most visitors, The Maori Court: The whole of the collections, which have been brought together for the purpose of illustrating fully history, arts, manners and customs of the Maori race, are exhibited by Dr. Walter L. Buller, one of the New Zealand Commissioners […]: They comprise a fine series of life-size portraits, in oils, by Herr G. Lindauer, of well-known chiefs and typical Maoris of both sexes, all in characteristic native costume; also a collection of Maori mats, shawls, and robes of every description.¹³

In his commentary on the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, Frank Cundall, Chief Assistant Secretary to the Royal Commission, describes how Lindauer's portraits were presented in the context of objects from Māori art and everyday life (fig. 5, 6). The portrayals belong to an imposing self-celebration of the British Empire, in which the wealth of the colonies from Cyprus via India as far as New Zealand was meant to be demonstrated, and an opportunity was to be created “not only of giving a stimulus to commercial interests and intercourse, but of strengthening that bond of union between Her Majesty's subjects in all parts of the Empire”, as the Prince of Wales put it in an anticipatory speech.¹⁴ Thus the economic, political and ideological framework of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition is described, which is committed to the nineteenth-century faith in technological progress. The art on display is closely intertwined with the global interests of the industrial age.

5 “Colonial & Indian Exhibition, 1886. New Zealand. Maori Tomb”, in: Reports on the Colonial Sections of the Exhibition, issued under the supervision of the Council of the Society of Arts, and edited by H.T. Wood, London 1887 (reprod. from: University of Ontago Library, Hocken Collections: https://hockensnapshop.ac.nz/nodes/view/3213, last retrieved 7 Jun 2018)

6 “Colonial & Indian Exhibition, 1886. New Zealand. View of Court Looking S.E.”, in: Reports on the Colonial Sections of the Exhibition, issued under the supervision of the Council of the Society of Arts, and edited by H.T. Wood, London 1887 (reprod. from: University of Ontago Library, Hocken Collections: https://hockensnapshop.ac.nz/nodes/view/3210, last retrieved 7 Jun 2018)

[8] The exhibition attempts as comprehensive a presentation of New Zealand as possible: from collected natural items to the indigenous populace and its cultural objects. In thus reconstructing the apparently original and authentic context of the ‘Other’, the British Empire secures its own civilizational domain in history.¹⁵ The objects from Māori culture and, with them, Lindauer's portraits become objects of British erudition and prestige. The paintings are made to function as documentary and authentic depictions of Māori culture.

[9] The historian James Clifford points out that European museal concepts traditionally follow the principle of “culture collecting” when presenting art from outside Europe.¹⁶ According to him, they collect objects with the aim of encompassing a culture as fully as possible. In this process, these objects function as trophies of colonialism.

[10] First and foremost, though, Lindauer's paintings are read in the context of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition as ethnographic documents. They are meant to provide insight into the New Zealand ethnicities and cultures threatened with extinction, and to contribute to their reconstruction. That was precisely why Henry Partridge, a businessman and collector resident in New Zealand, commissioned them.¹⁷ What is decisive from this perspective, is that in their reception they function as representations of ‘reality’.

Documentary Representations?

[11] Ethnographic depictions claim documentary status. In the anthropological photography of those days, the claim to objectivity culminated in the pretension to depict nothing less than ‘reality’ itself. In the nineteenth century, Lindauer's paintings lent themselves to functioning as ethnographic portraits not only by referencing reality – he accordingly uses photographs as a basis for his paintings¹⁸ – and by their richly detailed painting style, but also through his standardised mode of depiction: The majority of the paintings show bust-length portraits in three-quarter view; the background is often in dark brown shadow, in some of them a landscape with a low horizon forms the foil, so that the figure stands out against the dark, cloudy sky (fig. 7, 8).

7 Gottfried Lindauer, Tawhiao Matutaera Potatau Te Wherowhero, 1882, oil on canvas, 88 × 70 cm. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of H E Partridge, 1915, shown at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886 in London (reprod. from: Karentzos, “Bilder des ‘Exotischen′. Gottfried Lindauer im Kontext europäischer Portraitmalerei”, 178)

8 Gottfried Lindauer, Taraia Ngakuti Te Tumuhia, 1874, oil on canvas, 85 × 70 cm. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of H E Partridge, 1915 (reprod. from: Matiu Baker, “Gottfried Lindauer in Berlin – 49 Māori-Portraits und ihre Geschichten”, in: Gottfried Lindauer – Die Māori-Portraits, eds. Udo Kittelmann and Britta Schmitz, Cologne 2014, 66-165, here 83)

[12] Ethnographic representations are equally characterised by the plainness of their background and by standardisation. They aim at serialisation and thus claim comprehensive coverage. This machinery produced one new picture after another: in Allan Sekula's words what resulted was tantamount to “a voracious optical encylopedism”,¹⁹ purporting to offer comprehensive, universal and systematically ordered knowledge.

[13] Elizabeth Edwards stresses how the production of ethnographic images is intended to “organise” the “Others”: photography is meant to furnish systematic anthropological data for taxonomic analyses.²⁰ Photography serves as the medium for objectification, although it always implies a chosen viewpoint, and does, therefore, from the outset construct the reality it seems to depict in a supposedly neutral manner. A photographic apparatus is a viewing device which determines the gaze. Such focusing of the gaze and of the process of visualization imply a form of control, a domestication of perception. In that process, photography adopts conventions of the centralised perspective.²¹ As Bernd Busch explains, “seeing become photographic” is “dominance become objectified”.²² Privileging seeing and visibility in scholarly investigation endows the optics of bodily images with the validity of visual evidence.

[14] This tendency towards objectivisation and dominance is already characteristic of photography in its early phase. It had been instituting visual codes for Otherness²³ since its inception in the nineteenth century. During that period, journeys of exploration to other countries and cultures had at their disposal new scientific instruments distinguished by their capacity to register images of the Other in extreme detail. What purports to be documentary and scientific registration of foreign cultures does, however, actually produce them in the first place. Photography is not without a spatial dimension, but creates a zone of Otherness, which it defines geopolitically, in effect demarcating it. In this sense, we could re-apply Christine Buci-Glucksmann's phrase of “the cartographic gaze of art”²⁴ to characterise photography.

[15] In the context of colonialism, Lindauer's portraits could be categorised under this ethnographical principle – not just by dint of their documentary character and their seriality, but also – and not least – through the depiction of everyday scenes, which show Māori engaged in crafts, at home or having a moko (tattoo) inscribed (fig. 9).

9 Gottfried Lindauer, The Tohunga-ta-moko at Work, oil on canvas, 188.6 x 233.7 cm. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, gift of H E Partridge, 1915 (reprod. from: Gottfried Lindauer 1839-1926. Pilsen Painter of the New Zealand Māori, eds. Aleš Filip and Roman Musil, exh. cat., Revnice 2015, 259)

These genre scenes apparently offer something ‘typical’ and everyday and hence give the impression of being representative views of the Māori way of life. In addition, the Māori buildings exhibited at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition were ‘enlivened’ with costumed wax figures, “[to] give the visitor a very fair idea of the ‘Maori at home’”²⁵ (incidentally the title of one of Lindauer’s genre scenes, which was also exhibited in London; fig. 10).

10 Gottfried Lindauer, The Maori at Home or Harawira Mahakai, 1885, oil on canvas, 267 x 200 cm. Whanganui Regional Museum Collection, shown at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886 in London (reprod. from: Rebecca Rice, “Lindauer’s Māori at Home and Abroad”, in: Gottfried Lindauer – Die Māori-Portraits, eds. Udo Kittelmann and Britta Schmitz, Cologne 2014, 186-192, here 188)

[16] It is significant that at this colonial exhibition the Prince of Wales was actually presented with a Lindauer painting, which depicts a smiling Māori woman dancing and is still in the royal collection today (fig. 11).²⁶ Women were symbols denoting the colonised, subjugated land.

11 Gottfried Lindauer, Terewai Horomona, the Maori Poi Dancer, 1886, oil on canvas, 101.6 × 81.28 cm. London, Royal Collection, shown at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886 in London (reprod. from: Karentzos, “Bilder des ‘Exotischen′. Gottfried Lindauer im Kontext europäischer Portraitmalerei”, 179)

[17] To this extent, Lindauer's paintings seem to fit in with colonialist image production. However, unlike ethnographic depictions, the persons in Lindauer's case are usually named; they are not anonymous representatives of their ethnic identity. In addition, the portraits' subjects come across as being very individually represented, as the moko are also rendered in great detail and are not mere ornaments (fig. 12). In this respect, they refute any typification and schematisation.

12 Gottfried Lindauer, Renata Kawepo, Tama ki Hikurangi, 1885, oil on canvas, 69 × 58 cm. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of H E Partridge, 1915, shown at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886 in London (reprod. from: Karentzos, “Bilder des ‘Exotischen′. Gottfried Lindauer im Kontext europäischer Portraitmalerei”, 178)

[18] In her research on portraiture, Rebecca Parker Brienen, drawing on Richard Brilliant, has established the concept of the “ethnographic portrait”,²⁷ which aims at grasping the tense relationship between depictions of individuals and portraits as representatives of entire ethnic groups. However, this concept does not fit Lindauer, as it too narrowly reduces his images to the ethnographic.²⁸ Also Schmidt-Linsenhoff's concept of the “ethnographic typological portrait”, derived from Albert Eckhout's presentations of various population groups in Brazil in his ‘Copenhagen Cycle’, stressing their ideological import and schematization,²⁹ is not fully applicable to Lindauer’s portraits. In the context of the colonial exhibition, the pictures may have been perceived in this fashion, but they exceed it by dint of their strong individualisation and identification of their subjects. Focusing on the face in the bust portrait engenders a direct counterpart.

[19] In addition, Lindauer does not depict Māori exclusively in ostensibly traditional clothing, as the paintings chosen for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition suggest, but shows some of his subjects also in European dress (fig. 13, 14).³⁰ Māori adoption of British clothing styles shifts them – undesirably in the context of the colonial exhibition – closer to the colonists, something that would have caused irritation. The latter would have found such integrated counterparts, in the words of Homi K. Bhaba, the theoretician of postcolonialism, “unhomely”. By the concept of colonial mimicry Bhaba describes such forms of apprehension. Mimicry denotes the colonised becoming assimilated to the colonisers, something, however, that meets with restrictions in colonialism: the integrating colonial subject counts as “almost the same, but not quite” – “almost the same but not white”.³¹ In this context, skin colour serves as the badge of the ‘Other’. Mimicry as partial similarity, however, renders the certainty of cultural dominance fragile and is, to that extent, ambivalent.³²

13 Gottfried Lindauer, Wi Parata Te Kakakura, no date, oil on canvas, 52.2 x 45 cm. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of H E Partridge, 1915 (reprod. from: Baker, “Gottfried Lindauer in Berlin – 49 Māori-Portraits und ihre Geschichten”, 131)

14 Gottfried Lindauer, Maori Girl, ca. 1874, oil on canvas, 65.7 x 52.8 cm. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (reprod. from: Baker, “Gottfried Lindauer in Berlin – 49 Māori-Portraits und ihre Geschichten”, 77)

Lindauer's last-mentioned portrait figures perform this mimicry not only through their English clothing, but particularly through being portrayed in oils. To mitigate the disturbing similarity to the colonial power, the only portraits chosen for the colonial exhibition in London were those of Māori whose distinct facial moko and traditional Māori apparel appear markedly ‘exotic’.

Mimetic Representations – Portrait Painting and Photography

[20] We have seen how the documentary effect of Lindauer's paintings goes beyond an ethnographic reading: a rendition true-to-nature is highly important for the portrait genre too. The very myth relating to the origin of portrait painting points to the mimetic function of pictures: in his Natural History (ca. 77 AD), Pliny the Elder describes how portraits originated in silhouettes. In the legend a young woman, Dibutade, fixes the image of her lover by setting a candle in front of him and tracing his shadow on the wall. The silhouette thus points to a referent and has what amounts to an indexical structure. It is a sort of proof that its subject exists. Wilhelm Eduard Daege's 1832 painting The Invention of Painting, held by the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, illustrates this story (fig. 15). What is decisive is that a silhouette can count as a sort of copy of reality.

15 Wilhelm Eduard Daege, The Invention of Painting, 1832, oil on canvas, 176.5 × 135.5 cm. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (reprod. from: Karentzos, “Bilder des ‘Exotischen′. Gottfried Lindauer im Kontext europäischer Portraitmalerei”, 180)

Significantly, this legend was recounted in a talk given by the artist Johann Heinrich Füssli (English: Henry Fuseli) before the members of the Royal Academy in London. Füssli wrote the text in 1801, in which he declares: if any legend deserved to be believed, then it was that love story of the young woman from Corinth, who fixed the silhouette of her lover so that it could serve as a true representation. From that Füssli develops some observations on the “first attempt at painting”.³³ According to this train of thought, the shadows and thus portraiture point to a reality-as-origin.

[21] In the second half of the nineteenth century, portrait painting was for numerous artists still linked to the claim to being a true-to-life depiction. It was not by chance that photography was, even though many distanced themselves from it,³⁴ an important aid for the portraiture of the day. In art criticism at the end of the nineteenth century, Gaston Tissandier, for instance, stressed this role performed by photography: “We shall, however, see that the photographic art is capable of rendering great service to painters of the greatest talent”.³⁵ Franz von Lenbach³⁶, Gustave Courbet, Max Liebermann and Hans Makart³⁷ are examples of prominent artists who used photographs as a basis for their works. Such popular artists had numerous commissions, and it is precisely these which show that portrait painting in no way became redundant through competition with the medium of photography,³⁸ but occupied its own niche: a portrait in oils was regarded as prestigious, valuable and genteel.

[22] Lindauer's paintings were also linked to this sort of ennoblement. The genre of painting invested the Māori represented with special repute and simultaneously indicated a high social status in their society. Most of those painted were, in actual fact, tribal chiefs and well-known personalities who played a central role in the history of New Zealand.³⁹ How closely the medium of portraits was linked to privilege is shown by, for instance, Joshua Reynolds' picture of the Tahitian Omai (ca. 1776), who was perceived in England as an exotic prince, but back home belonged to the lower middle class (fig. 16).⁴⁰

16 Joshua Reynolds, Omai, ca. 1776, oil on canvas, 236 × 146 cm. Private collection (reprod. from: Karentzos, “Bilder des ‘Exotischen′. Gottfried Lindauer im Kontext europäischer Portraitmalerei”, 181)

[23] The marked richness of detail and the precision in Lindauer's pictures do not derive only from photography, but reach back to the techniques of the Nazarenes group of artists, among them Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, Wilhelm Schadow and Peter von Cornelius. From 1855 to 1861, Lindauer studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts under Leopold Kupelwieser and Joseph von Führich, who were both close to the Nazarenes;⁴¹ von Führich, for example, had, together with Overbeck, worked on the artistic decor of the Villa Massimo in Rome.⁴² This school focused above all on Christian motifs and was inspired by early Renaissance Italian art. The line was central to Nazarene painting, so that sharp contours delineated the figures.⁴³ The translucent application of colour additionally emphasised the line drawing.⁴⁴ Accordingly, for the Nazarene Gustav Heinrich Naeke, for instance, the line represented “the last and most authentic bastion of truth and hence a scarcely surpassable means of expression for Nazarene thinking”.⁴⁵ In his memoirs, the artist Ludwig Richter, meanwhile having distanced himself, also emphasises the importance of the line for the Nazarene group of artists: pencils could not be sharp enough, and he and his compadres fell in love with every blade of grass.⁴⁶

[24] Lindauer seems to have executed his compositions directly onto canvas, as very few preparatory studies and sketches by him have been preserved.⁴⁷ The underlying drawings are rendered in detail, as one restorer, Sarah Hillary, has demonstrated.⁴⁸ Lindauer literally underpinned some of his later paintings with photographs by painting over the latter. Hillary has discovered that two portraits use cut-outs from photographs.⁴⁹ Here an essential advantage of painting compared to photography becomes apparent: nineteenth-century photography's lack of colour sets limits to its mimesis and is overcome by painting (thus nineteenth-century photographs often had colour laboriously applied by a hand wielding a brush). In Lindauer's paintings of Māori with moko, the aesthetic dimension of colour shows to advantage particularly well: the ornaments of the moko stand out precisely by dint of their bluish or greenish hue, and in addition the fine black lineature is visible within the patterns. This makes the moko appear very sculptural, whilst in black and white photographs they tend to appear, by contrast, graphic and two-dimensional. The difference becomes obvious when we compare Lindauer's painting of Paora Tuhaere, for instance, with George Pulman's photograph of him (fig. 17, 18).

17 Gottfried Lindauer, Paora Tuhaere, 1895, oil on canvas, 67.7 × 56.3 cm. Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, gift of H E Partridge, 1915 (reprod. from: Karentzos, “Bilder des ‘Exotischen′. Gottfried Lindauer im Kontext europäischer Portraitmalerei”, 182)

18 George Pulman, Paora Tuhaere, ca. 1870, albumen photographic print, 14 × 10.2 cm (reprod. from: Karentzos, “Bilder des ‘Exotischen′. Gottfried Lindauer im Kontext europäischer Portraitmalerei”, 183)

Māori in Vienna

[25] The Māori's ornamental styling of their bodies makes them appear ‘savages’ in nineteenth-century reception. Alois Riegl, for example, talks about a “primitive form of décor” in his reflections on New Zealand ornamentation and uses it to support his theory on the development of ornaments.⁵⁰ The collection of the Austrian ethnographer Andreas Reischek, who had explored New Zealand between 1877 and 1889, provided Riegl with practical examples.

[26] Reischek's interest in researching New Zealand was inspired by Ferdinand von Hochstetter, who had taken part as a travelling scientist in the first Austrian circumnavigation of the globe with the frigate Novara.⁵¹ The Novara expedition served to present Austria-Hungary as a major power in generating knowledge rather than through territorial conquest: “We all share the same wish to show the earth's inhabitants that we belong to a people who can and will participate in the successes of science even on the wide oceans.”⁵²

[27] Representing England, James Cook took some scientists as well as artists on board with him on his voyages, and for France, Napoleon likewise took a full entourage of artists and scientists with him on his Egyptian campaign. However, it was above all Alexander von Humboldt's research expeditions which became the model for the Novara expedition. This is the reason why Hochstetter called Humboldt the “master […] to whom we all bow in respect”.⁵³

[28] It was not just objects that such expeditions brought back to the metropolitan centres of Europe, but also people: following Cook's Tahitian Omai, numerous ‘exotics’ caused sensations. When Lindauer was studying in Vienna, two Māori who accompanied the Novara expedition back from New Zealand, Wiremu Toetoe und Hemera Rerehau, became a particular attraction.⁵⁴ They were considered educated, speaking English and learning German, and reports indicate that they were learning the art of printing in the court and state printery.⁵⁵ They were invited to salons, caused a stir by taking part in the torchlight parade to mark the hundredth birthday of Friedrich Schiller and even had an audience with the Emperor Franz Joseph and the Empress Elisabeth.⁵⁶ Toetoe and Rerehau were so popular in Vienna that Lindauer probably heard or read about their visit. The press reported on them extensively. Their reception can be compared with that of the Tahitian Omai in London, who was studied as the “embodiment of the figure of the ‘noble savage’ from current discourse” and caused a furore as a “natural gentleman”.⁵⁷ Along the same lines, Wiremu Toetoe was similarly described in the feuilletons as a “kanaka-gentleman”: he was “of elegant stature, with a pleasant demeanour”, had “deep, black glistening hair” and was dressed in European style. He would “not attract attention at all, were it not for the bronze colour of his skin and the green lines of fan-like tattooing on his forehead and the sides of his nose”.⁵⁸

[29] Despite the partial similarity, which can be understood in terms of Bhaba’s concept of mimicry, stereotypical styles of reception surface in the descriptions of the two Māori in Vienna, reducing them to their originality, their naturalness, naivety and unspoiled dispositions. The topos of the ‘noble savage’,⁵⁹ popularised above all by Michel de Montaigne and Rousseauism, also has had a great influence on the reception of Lindauer's Māori portraits. Thus one reviewer describes Lindauer's paintings as depictions of “Old-Time Maori” and stressed “their picturesqueness and their noble and generous natures”.⁶⁰ However, Leonard Bell remarks that such exoticising romanticism surrounding the ‘noblest savage’ in the nineteenth century differs markedly from the understanding of the ‘noble savage’ in the eighteenth century, which advanced the unspoiled ‘savage life’ as something superior to the overly sophisticated civilisation of Europe.⁶¹ The reception of Lindauer's Māori portraits should not, however, be simply reduced to this topos. We have demonstrated that it is precisely through individualising their subjects and implementing the tradition of portraiture as a genre that his representations offer considerable scope for acknowledgement of Māori and their cultural alterity.⁶²

Special Issue Guest Editors
Alexandra Karentzos, Miriam Oesterreich and Britta Schmitz, eds., Gottfried Lindauer – Painting New Zealand, in: RIHA Journal 0189-0197

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