Spectator Figures in NZ Paintings

Spectator Figures
in Some New Zealand Paintings & Prints

FRANCIS POUND

Augustus Earle's Distant View of the Bay of Islands, c.1827-28, has a foreground spectator figure with its back to us. Perhaps it represents the artist. Significantly, it is the only European figure in the painting (although it is faceless, the burdenless back, the immaculately white hat, the coat and trousers are sufficient signs of that). This spectator stands, absolutely still, in the centre of the picture, and gazes into the landscape, while the Maori figures, seen as the European's beasts of burden, move in the land. This stillness, this movement, is significant: for landscape painting, and the very idea of landscape, the aesthetic attitude to nature, is a European invention. The Maoris, familiar though they were with the land, did not paint landscape, nor feel the need to (an example of their attitude to the land is depicted in the carving to the foreground right). landscape, the aesthetic attitude to the land - standing still just to look at it is purely an imported convention.

AUGUSTUS EARLE Distant View of the Bay of Islands, New Zealand c 1827-28
watercolour (collection of The National Library of Australia)

The European observer of panoramas well knew that climbing to a high place for a 'view', stopping to contemplate it, and the emotion that resulted, was an entirely European performance. As George French Angas wrote of another such panorama: 'It was indeed a majestic scene; and I wished there had been other than savages to have gazed with me on its glories'.¹

Earle made a lot of landscapes where the white man looks at the view while in the company of Maoris. In the foreground of Keri Keri Falls, a Maori faces us, with her back to the fails, and gestures in to them. A European, just to her left, stands in profile and gazes across the falls. In the foreground Pakanae Village and Entrance to the Hokianga, another Maori faces us, and gestures in to the picture, while his European companion, his back to us, gazes in. The foreground to Kororareka Beach has the Maori figure, yet again facing us, gesturing in to the landscape, seemingly for a European seated in profile. In Village in a Kauri Forest, the Maori stands to the foreground left and gestures in to the picture, while looking to the European seated at right, who gazes across the stream. This European spectator (again in a white hat with a black band, as in Distant View of the Bay of Islands) is certainly the artist himself. In his words:
As the village lay on the opposite shore (of 'a small picturesque stream') from that on which we arrived, we sat some time under the shelter of a large tree to contemplate its appearance, and to give time to arrange our party for crossing the stream, and also for making a sketch.²

AUGUSTUS EARLE Keri Keri Falls
watercolour (collection of The National Library of Australia)

There is a certain irony, presumably unintended by Earle, that it should be the Maori who seems to point the landscape out to the European - for the land offered for his aesthetic delectation was soon to be taken by him from the Maori, in real life, for purposes quite other than the aesthetic.

In fact, the Maori to Europeans was 'natural man', and so part of nature. In Earle pictures mentioned above he is nature's representative, nature personified. Here then nature is pointing to itself, offering itself to the European spectator, to those cultivated in the art of seeing 'landscape'.

Let's turn now from such unintentional ironies to the grammar of painting.

Earle's spectator figure is a stock type in European art, from the Renaissance on. It represents the displaced glance of the picture's real spectator: it is the spectator's painted deputy. By it, it is the act of our seeing that we see. Plausibly posed as a bystander or onlooker to the depicted scene, it yet flagrantly represents us - like it, observers of a scene from which, spatially, we are and must remain implacably separate.

Often, like a lead-in figure, the spectator figure stands in the foreground, with its back to us, and gazes in to the depicted scene. Like the real spectator, it is separated from the scene it observes by a depicted space it can never cross. Sometimes, such separation, acknowledging the spectator's, is physically marked by a barrier close and parallel to the picture plane (the plane that separates us from the depicted scene).

AUGUSTUS EARLE Kororareka Beach
(detail), lithograph

Such spectator figures are not invariably in the foreground observing the main action. They, and the barrier parallel to the picture plane, may instead be put in the mid-ground, where they can observe nature instead of figures in action: as in Van Eyck's Rolin Madonna, or Ghirlandaio's Visitation, where mid-ground figures, their backs to us, gaze over a parapet to distant vistas. By the loss of their faces is marked a consciousness lost, absorbed in distant space, and our absorption invited.

By the nineteenth century, with Seurat (The Invalid), some of Caspar David Friedrich's paintings, and others, such mid-ground spectator figures were moved up to the foreground, often centrally placed, and their absorption in nature (mysterious because faceless) became the subject of the picture. Then, the spectator figure became the only figure in the picture. Raymond Mcintyre's La Somme c.1915 has a figure based on this type. With its back to us, it leans over the fence, the barrier parallel to the picture plane, and faces sleepily down to the background vista. (See Art New Zealand 1, p. 12)

In the man-centred Renaissance, neither absolute space, nor the loss of consciousness in it, could constitute the subject of a picture: they were adjuncts only to consciousness embodied in action. Not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with their all but pantheistic worship of nature, could nature, or the contemplation of it, become the picture's true subject. Then, the foreground spectator figure, lost in contemplation of nature, became a stock pathos formula.

That is why almost every nineteenth century New Zealand landscape painter offers at least one such figure, plausibly posed as a spectator of a depicted scene: That is why these spectator figures exist here in their hundreds.

Earle's pointing figures, like his spectator figures, are of a stock type in European painting from the Renaissance on. The pointing figure had even received theoretical justification in the major Renaissance treatise on painting, Alberti's de Pictura:
Then I like there to be someone in the narrative painting who tells the spectators what is going on, and either beckons them with his hand to look ... or points to some danger or remarkable thing in the picture . . . ³

For whom does the pointing figure point? In Kororareka Beach, in Pakanae Village and Entrance to the Hokianga and in Keri Keri Waterfall, the pointer has its back to what it points out. It does not point, then, for itself. Nor does it point for the European figure, who does not look at it. The European in Keri Keri Falls, in A Maori Village in a Kauri Forest, and in Pakanae Village and Entrance to the Hokianga, already sees the view (or so we are meant to believe). The pointing figure expresses the interest of only one character, neither painted figure nor the painter, but the real spectator. It is the spectator who is looking for the 'meaning' of the picture, who wants its 'centre' pointed out. The pointing represents the displaced glance lent by the spectator to his painted deputy. It is the act of viewing which points.

In many narrative paintings from the Renaissance on, as in Earle's paintings here, the narrative device of pointing is granted a naturalistic alibi, so that its narrative operations may be concealed - it is provided with a companion figure for whom it might seem to point. On the level of the action depicted, it may point for the spectator figure: on the level of narrativity, it points always for us, for the real spectator.

In most of those paintings by Earle and in all but one of the further New Zealand examples I shall adduce, the spectator figure gazes across vast vistas. In the nineteenth century European paintings that were the source of this convention, such figures were often used to symbolise men's aspiration to the infinite - most evidently, in Friedrich - or a related feeling of mans smallness in the vast face of nature, a kind of pleasurable vertigo, an awful frisson, theoretically justified by Burke's concept of the Sublime. (The common phrase, 'communion with nature', with its sacramental tinge, still suggests something of the content of such a stereotyped emotion.) We may sense something of this in Sir William Fox's Waitohi Harbour, 1847, where two European foreground figures, their backs to us, gaze down and across the immense sweep of hills, down to the sea, across harbour, across sea, into the blue bloom of remoteness. (Alexander Turnbull Library)

STANLEY PALMER Watching the Waves 1970
bamboo print

The nineteenth century European spectator had learned from art and literature to think of God, when, vertigo smiling up at him, he contemplated the Sublime landscape. As one New Zealand traveller wrote in 1832, of a natural spot of Sublime 'horror': 'I prayed most fervently to the great and merciful Father, creator of the Universe and its various inhabitants, whose utmost power and skill were nothing in competition with the stupendous works around me, that had never before been so nearly approached by civilised man's. Innumerable others saw the same in New Zealand nature, and felt and thought and wrote the same. It was as if, as Oscar Wilde might say, art had invented a type, and life had copied it, reproduced it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.

Nineteenth century Europeans often climbed hills for the view. When the landscape below had none of the horrors of the Sublime, but rather the calm of another pictorial type, the Beautiful, the spectator might still think of God. Obviously missionaries would be professionally inclined to do so. The Reverend John A Wilson wrote of 'a noble view all round' that: 'it lessened not the beauty of this Sabbath morn when viewed as the works of him "who is God and blessed forever".' The Reverend William Yate wrote of a view of the Bay of Islands: 'Here, if God be felt as present, the soul may enjoy an undisturbed contemplation of the wisdom and love of the Most High, in the works of Creation'.⁶ Even Earle, a self proclaimed despiser of the missionary and his works, wrote of the Bay of Islands: 'All appeared wild and magnificent, as if just fresh from the hands of nature; and it failed not to lead the mind up to the contemplation of the Creator'.⁷

Earle's words provide the perfect caption for his picture: Distant View of the Bay of Islands.

AUGUSTUS EARLE Pakanae Village and Entrance of the Hokianga
watercolour (collection of The National Library of Australia)

And the words of a twentieth century commentator on this nineteenth century ideal of the beneficient wilderness, an ideal visually based on the paintings of Claude, provide its perfect explanation:
The panoramic view, regardless of the state of cultivation or settlement, tahped a familiar aesthetic need for the assimilation and enjoyment of New Zealand nature. Its neo-classic ideas of pastorality, virtue, and allusion to empire and cults were harmonious with the aspirations of pioneers and their image of a new country . . . Such a varied prospect called forth 'Christian optimism', a visual expression of the plenitude of God's creation for man.⁸

Curiously enough, sometimes in New Zealand painting some of this delight in a 'good view', this half spiritual, half aesthetic attitude to nature, may be attributed by the European artist to the Maoris themselves. In Earle's Entrance to the Bay of Islands, a Maori stands in the foreground, with his back to us, and gazes across the hills to the sea and sky; in Earle's Rangihoua, a New Zealand Fortified Village, 1827, two Maoris, one seated in profile, the other with his back to us, both again placed on a high foreground promontory, gazes into the depth of pictorial space.

There are some much more recent examples of spectator figures in New Zealand Art. In the foreground of Stanley Palmer's Watching the Waves, a bamboo print of 1970, a girl is seated, her back to us, her hands on her knees, gazing out over the waves. in Palmer's Headland, Island and Clouds, bamboo print, 1971, a foreground girl, seen from behind, looks out to the island. In the foreground centre of Whatipu, bamboo print, 1974, a girl with her back to us gazes through the gap between two headlands to the horizon. In Mangonui, oil painting, 1969, two children in the foreground, their backs to us, look into the landscape in different directions, their eyebeams crossing deep in pictorial space.

AUGUSTUS EARLE A Maori Village in a Kauri Forest
lithograph

In the Palmers referred to above, the spectator figures are the children of the artist. Sometimes, the foreground spectator may be the artist himself, or at least, the artist, depicted. In Lejeune and Chazell's Keri Keri Falls, 1824, the artist, in company with two other spectator figures, is seated on a foreground promontory, seeing and sketching the scene we see. What this artist sees is a stock subject of nineteenth century painting, and a commonly sought picturesque site of the nineteenth and twentieth century tourist - the waterfall. The picturesque, like a picture - the already painted.

Earle too painted himself seated in a foreground sketching a waterfall - though he posed his native guide before it in classic contrapposto.

This figure type, the artist/spectator figure, is a stock type of European painting. The artist figure teaches us, in Barthes' terms, that 'narration (object) modifies narration (action); the message is parametrically linked with its performance; there is no question of an utterance on the one hand, and on the other an uttering'. More blatantly than any other kind of spectator figure, the artist figure 'reacts on language and demystifies, ravages the innocence of its utterance', so that 'what is told is the telling'; what is depicted is the depicting. Here, the act of depiction modifies what is depicted: equally, what is depicted modifies the act of depiction. That the artist was present at the scene, adds itself in to the scene of the picture, so that the act of the artist's depicting modifies what is depicted. Whet is depicted equally modifies the act of depiction, for the fact that a witness is needed to the truth of the waterfall (since its painters were tourists from distant France, painting for an audience in France) is allowed to influence the waterfall's depiction: that witness is actually shown. As Barthes put it: 'the message is parametrically linked with its performance'; one can no longer easily talk of what is told of the waterfall on the one hand, and on the other hand of its telling.

LeJEUNE and CHAZAL Cascade de Fanafaoua pres du Village de Kidikidi c1822-25
acquatint (from L.I. Duperrey's Voyaga autour du Monde) Collection of The Auckland Institute & Museum

'Jan Van Eyck was here'. Panofsky says of this signature to Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding (in which an artist figure appears in a mirror): 'no other work of art is signed in this peculiar fashion, which rather reminds us of the undesirable epigraphs recording the visits of pilgrims or tourists to places of worship or interest'.

Now, it is more than just coincidence with Panofsky's remark (or the present writer's convenience) that in the Renaissance woodcuts of city views put out for tourists and pilgrims, artist/spectator figures were included. In such woodcuts, on foreground hillocks, an artist figure, seen from behind, sits, drawing and seeing the scene we see. What is signified is this: 'The artist was here'.

in such prints (as in Lejeune and Chazell's Keri Keri Falls), on the level of verisimilitude the artist figure is proof, or rather guarantor, of the accuracy of the view; he certifies its veracity, that it was drawn from life, not invented, or uncertainly remembered: 'The artist was here'. On the level of depictivity, the artist figure acknowledges that what we see is a work of art - a representation made by the human hand; again, but in a different sense, it is asserted 'The artist was here'. The picture, then, signifies its own making.

AUGUSTUS EARLE Entrance to The Bay of Islands
watercolour (Collection of The National Library of Australia)

As in all types of spectator figure, the artist figure represents the displaced glance of the spectator, lent to a painted deputy - for the artist is but the artwork's first spectator. Plausibly placed as a spectator to the depicted event, the artist / spectator figure yet represents us: so that, again, it is the act of our seeing that we see.

1 . George French Angas, 1847, Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand . . ., Vol. II, Smith Elder and Co., London, page 121.
2. Augustus Earle, 1832 Narrative of a Residence in New Zealand (Republished Oxford, 1966)
3. Cecil Grayson, ed. Alberti On Painting and On Sculpture. The Latin texts of De Pi ctura and De Statua. Edited, with notes and translations by Cecil Grayson. 1972.
4. J. S. Polack, 1838, New Zealand, being a Narratime of Travels and Adventures during a residence in that country between the years 1831 and 1837, in two volumes/Vol 1, Richard Bently, New Burlington St, London, page 102.
5. Rev. John A. Wilson, The Letters of Rev. John A Wilson, Missionary at Opotiki, Tauranga, Auckland, and Puriri. Typescript, 1833-1865, Hocken Library, page 133.
6. Rev. William Yate, An Account of New Zealand; and of the Formulation and Progress of the Church Missionary Society's Mission in the Northern Island. R. B. Seeley and W Burnside, London. Second Edition, page 12.
7. Augustus Earle, op cit, page 174.
8. Paul Shepard, English Reaction to the New Zealand Landscape Before 1850, Pacific View Point Monograph No 4, Dept of Geography, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 1969, page 111. The present writer's quotations from nineteenth Century New Zealand writings are taken from this admirable book.