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Press, 19 October 1978, Page 2

By

BRIAN MACKRELL

Of Louis John Steele (1843-1918) it was said that he had “unfortunately given to students too much of a talent that was meant for mankind.” Most notable of those students was Charles Frederick Goldie, and his former tutor was outraged at an exhibition when critics praised the pupil who “easily carries off the honours” and had little to say on the work of “Mr Steele, the veteran artist.” While their relationship appears to have been a stormy one, Charles Goldie always spoke in praise of his first art teacher.

The son of English and French parents, Louis Steele arrived in New Zealand about 1885. He had studied art in England, Italy, and France, and had exhibited at the Royal Academy in the early 1880 s, gaining praise as etcher, engraver, and painter.

Few other details of his life before arrival in New Zealand are known. He is said to have “dodged bullets in a Franco-Prussian conflict; to have married an Italian beauty to whom he had a son. But he arrived in this country alone.

One of the' first professional artists to reside permanently in Auckland, he soon established himself in a studio in Victoria Arcade. For 30 years he taught aspiring colonial artists and was commissioned to portray many of Auckland’s leading citizens. Though he doubtlessly suffered some lean financial times, he was always the fashionable dandy, and it is recorded that his progress along Queen Street never failed to draw second-looks. Louis Steele was a skilled narrative painter—a precise miniaturist greatly influenced by the French artist, Ernst Meissonier. The meticulous attention to detail in his smaller works soon had critics calling him “The Meissonier of Maoriland Like Gottfried Lindauer, he sometimes used photographic images projected on to canvas as a background or subject for his work. While Lindauer certainly captured an aura of dignified “prescence”. in many of his Maori portraits, he was inclined. to add his own fanciful details to a subject’s tattoo pattern, hair style, and clothing. In his limited use of photographs Steele appears to have resisted this temptation to embellish.

The “Noble Savage” myth is reflected in Gottfried Lindauer’s work just as the “Dying Race” syndrome, with a few exceptions, confronts the viewer of C. F. Goldie’s aged subjects with titles such as “Memories. The Last of Her Tribe” (1913). Louis Steele’s Maori portraits exude a similar melancholia to those of his pupil but his narrative works evoke the fiery vitality and emotive force of ancient Maoridom. Today, L. J. Steele’s works are scattered, the location of some unknown.

He is best remembered for his collaboration with C. F. Goldie in “The Coming of The Maori” (1899) and his portrait of Sir John Logan Campbell (1910). “The Story of a Saddle,” a much acclaimed narrative painting he exhibited in 1888, is believed to be in France. “Maori Giri before Tattooed Head” " and “The Death of Captain Starlight” are in Australia. Few of his works are held by New Zealand galleries, although every substantial philatelic collection contains the stamps he designed to commeiftorate the International Exhibition of Arts and Industries held in Christchurch in 1906-07. His Maori studies include pictures illustrating various aspects of ancient culture such as tattooing and fire-making. The latter was the subject of what was probably his last work, “Maori Firestick” (1918), now on temporary loan to Wanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery.

Six of his oils and a number of preliminary sketches are held by the Auckland Art Gallery. Most notable of these are "The Explorer’s Message” (1915), a rofnanticised scene of two explorers and their horses standing over the remains of an earlier explorer, and the controversial “Spoils to the Victor” (1908).

“Spoils” is one of three Maori narrative works of sad, vengeful, violent, moments frozen in time—pictures about which countless historical stories could be woven. They are graphic portrayals of preEuropean life and custom painted against a late nineteenth century background of elaborately carved Whare Runanga. “Maori Girl before Tattooed Head” (1888) is a perceptive study of a grieving woman before the dried head of a beloved relative while carved ancestral effigies “look oil”. This might appear to be a macabre, morbid scene to modern viewers, but it is a factual presentation of. a custom wellrecorded by early European observers. The preserved head of a loved-one was ancient. Maoridom’s equivalent of todays photographic memento of the deceased. In “Defiance” (circa 1908?) a woman reviles the head of some detested enemy, again with ancestral images in the background. A gruesome but accurate depiction of the ancient code of Utu (recompense). The carved house in the background of “Defiance” is Hinemihi built by the Arawa people of Te Wairoa about 1880 and a popular tourist attraction of the day. In the 1886 Tarawera eruption many of the locals sheltered in Hinemihi, which was covered with a thick layer of volcanic debris. It was later dismantled and transported to England by the then Governor General, the Earl of Onslow, and still stands in Clandon Park in Louis Steele’s native Surrey. The artist probably used a Burton Brothers photograph of Hinemihi for this oil.

“Spoils to the Victor” (1908) has a poignant strength in the gaze of the woman war-prize which poses an eternal: What does she see? A 1909 critic, noting that: “It is not altogether a ‘nice’ subject,” said: “There is something that reaches to the heart in that gashed, mute, limp body of the dead warrior lying at the feet of his captive bride.” While these three works apparently do not relate to specific incidents in any particular tribal history, one of Louis Steele’s unfinished works does. In "Hurihia, wife of Te Tauri” the artist portrays a dramatic incident in early Taupo history. A marauding party of Ngati Maru desecrated Tuwharetoa graves and assaulted a party‘of local woman including Hurihia. Instead of killing them the Ngati Maru carried off all the women’s clothing. In naked shame the highranking Hirihia made her way along Lake Taupo’s shores to Te Rapa Pa. En route she came across an old fishing net which she draped about her body. Subsequently she ran through several Tuwharetoa settlements calling on her people to avenge the insults of Ngati Maru. They did so with alacrity. Hurihia’s action was in accordance with another old Maori custom where exposure of the female body was used to arouse public indignation. The naked breast was considered natural and decent but exposure of the lower anatomy was another matter altogether. Was L. J. Steele simply a meticulous artist with a deep interest in and knowledge of ancient Maori culture which he recorded with his brush? Or is there another dimension to his art?

The art critic, Leonard ■Bell, believes that at least two of Louis Steele’s works fulfill “a dual function — standing both as depictions of possible events from Maori history and as expressions of contemporary European male fantasies.”

According to this interpretation of Louis Steele’s “Spoils to the Victor,” the woman is deliberately posed “in a manner that best facilitates mental rape. . . for what is implicit in the imagery of bound women is that the owner-spectator can do with the bound object whatever he desires.”

“Defiance” purportedly “embodies the negative side of a dual vision of women frequently found in the art, literature, and social life in Victorian and Edwardian times. In the positive aspect of the vision women were subjugated, submissive, perhaps bound. The defiant untamed, dominating woman was the negative, nightmare side of the fantasy. . . ”

Are the works of Louis John Steele, the man inbetween Gottfried Lindauer and C. F. Goldie in the history of New Zealand art, more than they seem? Perhaps the answer is that much more than “beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.”