Rare Oil Painting Of New Zealand Landscape By Charles Goldie Expected To Bring Up To $150,000

A rare oil painting of an unidentified landscape by renowned New Zealand artist Charles Goldie is expected to bring up to $150,000 at an art auction in Auckland later this month.

When Evening Shadows Fall is one of four works of art by Goldie to be included in a sale of Important and Rare Art at the International Art Centre in Parnell on November 28.

The painting is rare because Goldie painted only a handful of landscapes, and mainly concentrated on portraits of Maori elders (kaumatua) which earned him a global reputation as New Zealand’s finest painter of respected Maori leaders.

The Goldie landscape, which is predicted to sell for up $150,000, has been in private ownership and was completed and signed by Goldie in 1900, the year it was first exhibited at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington.

“Goldie is considered in the art world to be the finest painter of Maori elders in New Zealand art history but he completed a relatively small number of paintings of New Zealand landscapes,” said Richard Thomson, director of the International Art Centre and auctioneer for the sale.

“The small number of Goldie landscapes makes this work very rare. It had been in the same private ownership since it was bought in 1999 when it was named The Lonely Shore. The location or the woman it features have not been identified.

The Goldie works to be offered at the sale also include an oil painting In Doubt, Ina te Papatahi who lived at the Waipapa Māori hostel in Mechanics Bay, Auckland, not far from Charles Goldie’s Hobson Street studio.

Ina te Papatahi was the niece of prominent Ngāpuhi rangatira (chiefs) Eruera Maihi Patuone and Tāmati Waka Nene, who both signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. The work is expected to sell for up to $850,000.

The other two Goldie works are of Guide Sophie, the Maori guide Sophia Hinerangi who regularly took tourists to the Pink and White Terraces at Lake Rotomahana, the New Zealand landscape feature described by author Mark Twain as the eighth wonder of the world.

The two Goldie works of Guide Sophia, both pencil drawings, are estimated to sell for $150,000 and $160,000. The Terraces were destroyed in the eruption of Mt Tarawera in 1886.

Other works in the sale include Motukorea, Torea-Pango II by Don Binney (an oil painting of a variable oystercatcher expected to bring up to $650,000), several works by Colin McCahon (ranging from $150,000 to $350,000) and Morons, a Banksy screen print featuring a Christies auction room in London full of collectors bidding for a number of artworks. The Banksy print is predicted to sell for up to $120,000.

Still Life by Dora Maar, known for her romantic relationship with Spanish artist Pablo Picasso from late 1935 to the early 1940s, is another highly interesting work in the sale, said Mr Thomson. As a model and muse, she inspired the figure known as the Weeping Woman in studies Picasso produced in response to the devastating impact of the Spanish Civil War.

She featured in Picasso’s Head of a Woman No. 1, Portrait of Dora Maar, from 1939, depicts Maar with large, melancholy eyes and pursed lips, her lustrous black hair rendered in layers of azure. After the relationship ended, she rejected Picasso’s portraits of her as lies. Still Life is expected to bring up to $15,000.

Three works by New Zealand artist and writer Jacqueline Fahey, 94, will also be offered with one,

Rob Plays The Blues,

expected to bring up to $35,000. Fahey is due to have a public conversation with University of Auckland art historian, Associate Professor Linda Tyler, at the gallery in the week before the auction.

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