Close to Home: Selected paintings from Te Rū Movers and Shakers - Early New Zealand Portraits by William Beetham

If Mary Beetham had not secreted her husband’s easel and paints in their luggage when the couple sailed from England to NZ in 1855, we may not have the amazing collection of portraits now being reappraised as a significant part of New Zealand art history. A selection of paintings by William Beetham, who established Brancepeth, east of Masterton, is currently on display at Aratoi, providing a rare window on a time of rapid cultural, political and environmental change in the region and New Zealand at large.
 
William Beetham had had no intention of picking up his career as a professional artist in the Antipodes - a path which had seen him exhibiting at the Royal Academy, London, and painting heads of state in Europe. Instead he was determined to devote himself and his family “to rural pursuits” in the newly formed colony, settling with his wife, seven sons and five daughters on 10,000 acres of land in the hills of Wainuioru.
 
“He had to lease the land then stock it within three months to avoid forfeiting it,” says descendant Ed Beetham, who helped to develop the exhibition. Three hundred merino sheep were bought in to achieve this and the Beetham family were on their way to establishing one of New Zealand’s largest sheep stations, which in its heyday had 300 employees, its own school, post office and an extensive library, now housed at Victoria University.
 
However, William Beetham was destined to continue to paint and within weeks of arriving in New Zealand, he had accepted his first commission to paint a Maori chief. It came from Tamihana Te Rauparaha who requested a posthumous portrait of his father, the famed rangitira Te Rauparaha.
 
He continued painting for the next three decades, depicting other chiefs, politicians, pastoralists, merchants, and their wives, along with his own family.
 
Aratoi director Alice Hutchison describes William Beetham as a “national icon…..he was the first professional portrait artist in New Zealand decades before Gottfried Lindauer and Charles Goldie.”
 
One of her favourite paintings is Beetham’s self portrait painted in the 1850s when he was in his forties: “It is delicately painted and shows a man with depth, personality and a seriousness of purpose. His work has a directness and immediacy even today, and he was not necessarily trying to flatter his sitter.”
 
 
The exhibition developed out of Te Rū - Movers and Shakers – Early New Zealand Portraits by William Beetham, held at the NZ Portrait Gallery earlier this year. Aratoi staff, with the help of Ed Beetham, family members and others, then decided to develop a unique exhibition incorporating some of the work shown in Wellington, along with other paintings, watercolours and papers from the family’s collection - many of which had not been seen in public before -  to explore Beetham’s Wairarapa connection.
 
The exhibition follows on from two other local projects - In the Boar’s Path – Brancepeth, by Alex Hedley and Gareth Winter, published last year, and Dr Lydia Wever's book Reading on the Farm – Victorian Fiction and the Colonial World -which draws on material from Brancepeth’s library of 2000 Victorian books.
 
 
Unlike Movers and Shakers, this exhibition does not feature portraits of Maori rangatira due to loans not being extended, but it is known that family members learnt to speak fluent te reo and William Beetham was respected by Maori for his ability to depict moko accurately, a skill Ed Beetham thinks may be due to the training he received to paint Victorian lace for his portraits of women. “One of the remarkable things about Brancepeth was its biculturalism,” said Dr Wevers.
 
Local iwi, descendants of those who lived in the Gladstone / Admiral’s Hill region near Brancepeth, welcomed the paintings at the opening on Friday, and P J Devonshire outlined the connection to Wi Tako’s carved pataka ‘Nuku Tewhatewha’ now on permanent display at the Dowse Art Museum collection. The pataka  was variously on land owned by Beetham, then relocated to Brancepeth, before being returned to the Hutt in 1982.  
 
Names of other pioneering Wairarapa families such as the Bartons and Bidwills emerge in the portraits shown here.  There are also watercolours of Brancepeth and the surrounding land, one of which, explains Ed Beetham, shows how William envisaged the estate when it was fully developed.
 
As well as being a highly skilled artist, the exhibition gives the impression of William Beetham as a warm family man and devoted husband who was still praising his wife's ‘classic’ beauty in her late 50s. He was a founding member of NZ Academy of Fine Arts, and its first president. His last portrait was of the former premier, Sir Julius Vogel, in 1887.
 
There will be a public programme of further speakers in the new year including Dr Wevers and Gareth Winter, accompanying this exhibition. See www.aratoi.co.nz  for more details.