The Time of Kai would have to be one of Lindauer's more
ambitious scene paintings. It illustrates pā life where family and
kin groups gather for kai: everyone is depicted in activities
focused around kai. The steam rises from an open hāngī, signalling
the kai is cooked and ready to distribute. Individuals gather and
small woven kono of the type illustrated in Lindauer's earlier
painting Maoris Plaiting Flax
Baskets are used to distribute the evening's kai to whānau
groups. A wide range of food is depicted: corn cobs, cooked pipi
and tuatua, taewa (potato) and ika (fish). There is even merengi
(water melon) being sliced and shared between two young boys
sitting in the top left, while a line of tuna (eel) are drying by
the kāuta to the far right. Elsewhere washing is drying in the
mahau of the meetinghouse at the centre back and kunekune pigs
chase hens and kurī play in the courtyard in front.
Lindauer presents a busy scene painting that is slightly
reminiscent of a sixteenth-century Bruegel genre painting with its
arrangement of activities and characters and its muted colours.
Interestingly, everybody in The Time of Kai is shown
wearing European clothing exclusively, unlike the other genre
paintings in which Lindauer uses customary Māori dress and attire
to tell the narrative. The Time of Kai takes a
different approach. It presents Māori society in a time of
transition: its life and customs are very much in a time of change
here. Next to the wharenui at top left is a bell hanging in a
belfry which would be used to signal religious services,
illustrating the influence of Christianity and missionary
contact.
Lindauer's use of source photography is again evident in this
work. However, it takes on a new element here. His son Hector is
the source image of the young boy seated on a log eating a potato
from a kono, as his wife Rebecca is for the kuia wearing a red
scarf around her head and looking directly at the viewer. Both
images have been cited in the Lindauer family archives and it is
intriguing that the painter has slipped them into the painting
unaware that they would one day be revealed through
research. The Time of Kai is one of three large scene
paintings Lindauer produced in 1907 for Henry Partridge.
Nigel Borell
(originally published in Gottfried Lindauer's New
Zealand: The Māori Portraits, edited by Ngahiraka Mason and
Zara Stanhope, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki and AUP,
2016.)
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