Te Aitu te Irikau, an Arawa Chieftainess, first appeared in 1911, and she was painted around eight times by Charles Frederick Goldie through until 1922. Other variants of this painting include Reverie – Te Aitu Te Irikau (an Arawa Chieftainess), shown at the Auckland Society of Arts exhibition in 1919, and A Woman of High Lineage, which was sold through Peter Webb Galleries in 1976. Goldie is well known for his technical virtuosity and his considerable painterly skills have been brought to bear here in Te Aitu te Irikau. As with many of Goldie’s portraits, our knowledge of the painter has outstripped that of the sitter. Goldie names the sitter, but has also applied a title intended to convey the sentiment: A Happy Thought. References to Te Aitu te Irikau are scant though she was obviously a noted Chieftainess. As represented by her distinctive moko kauae, the thrummed cloak, the shark’s tooth earring, the hei tiki and the huia feather are all traditional symbols of status. Historically, portraiture has memorialised the rich and powerful, the famous and the infamous. Portraits act as a physical record of a life, and stand as both ethnological and historical documents. They tell us not only about the sitter, but also about the painter and the conventions of the society in which the works were conceived. These images of elderly Maori, have been criticised as being overly sentimental representations of a dying race. The subjects were deliberately depicted as being part of a society that was winding down into old age, infirmity and death. Their downturned faces, half-closed eyes, softly wrinkled faces and grey hair, created an overall impression of gentle decline. While we now know this to be a romantic fabrication, the very uniqueness of early Maori has ensured the paintings remain as important today as they were in Goldie’s lifetime. EMMA FOX