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Heaphy

Auckland University Press

Young Charles

Heaphy's early London years are the least documented part of his life. The date of his birth, the name and location of his first school and the identities of his first friends are all unknown. The drawings and paintings he made in his boyhood and adolescence either no longer exist or are in the hands of private collectors who prefer anonymity. His mother evidently died when he was young, but how young is uncertain. It might have been shortly after, or even during, childbirth. Heaphy is said to have been the youngest of five children. We know the names of three of his siblings, but not of the fourth, and most of their birth dates are approximate. Heaphy does not mention his family in any of his published writings. Although the title of the most substantial of these, Narrative of a Residence in Various Parts of New Zealand, suggests an autobiography, the book is less a narrative than an annotated gazetteer of the country's early settlements. Even in the private correspondence that survives, Heaphy comments only obliquely on his upbringing. We are reliant for some information on the unpublished autobiography of his friend, Frederick Moore, written in old age, when memory was failing. A few hesitant inferences, in regard to family heirlooms, can also be made from the will drawn up by Heaphy's widow in 1909.

The picture is not hopeless, however, just hazy. Enough can be gleaned to discern the ways in which Heaphy's social background conformed to the norm for nineteenth-century colonists and the ways in which his case was singular. We might be a little unsure of his exact place in the family, but we know for certain he had an older brother and this fact is significant. Primogeniture was standard practice in Victorian England. Younger sons grew up aware that in all likelihood they would inherit little or nothing. That is why so many of them tried their luck in the colonies, while the most senior of their male siblings stayed at home to tend to the family estate. Heaphy made the move ahead of the main influx, but New Zealand's early settlements abounded with younger sons who had chosen to migrate for much the same reasons that he did.

What is unusual about his background is that he came from a family of professional artists. His father, his brother and two of his sisters were all painters seeking commissions. One can point to analogous situations in Renaissance Italy, but nobody else in Victorian New Zealand sprang from such a heavily art-oriented clan. During Charles's boyhood the Heaphys were better off than the great majority of Londoners, but theirs was a precarious kind of affluence, for it depended on continuing to attract the patronage of the aristocracy. In order to prosper, they needed to ingratiate themselves to the rich and powerful. Throughout his life Charles, too, was continually on the lookout for suitable patrons. At various times he attached himself to William and Arthur Wakefield, William Fox, Charles Ligar, George Grey and Donald McLean. So long as they paid him or granted him favours, he was their faithful advocate. Fidelity for hire, one might say. If a readiness to toady is one of Charles's least admirable traits, it is nevertheless intelligible in terms of his upbringing. He repeated behaviour patterns learned from his older kin.

Charles's father, Thomas Heaphy, was a self-made man. Talent and determination had lifted him several rungs up the social ladder. By the time of Charles's infancy, Thomas was a man of property, leading a genteel, middle-class lifestyle. Indeed, real estate was beginning to supplant art as his paramount interest. The Heaphys, however, were still a level or two below the wealthy, long-established families who by tradition sent their daughters to finishing schools and their sons to Oxford or Cambridge. Arrivistes, the Heaphys were guided more by opportunity than by precept. By attending the Royal Academy Schools in the late 1830s Charles became the first member of the family to receive any form of tertiary education.

The official requirement to register births, marriages and deaths was not introduced in England until 1837. No record of Charles's baptism has yet come to light from a London church. Still, we can hazard a reasonable guess as to the year of his birth, if not the month. The register for the Royal Academy Schools shows that he entered the school of painting on 5 December 1837 at the age of seventeen. This suggests he was born either in 1820 or in the last few weeks of 1819.

From legal documents and advertising material relating to his father, we can specify his childhood address as 7 St John's Wood Road in northwest London. Then, as now, this was the main approach road to Lord's Cricket Ground, which has occupied its current site since 1811. The first of London's deliberately planned suburbs, St John's Wood was, in the 1820s, a pleasant, leafy, semi-rural place to live, with villas set in large gardens. In his youth Charles was almost certainly accustomed to rambling across open country. This helps explain why he adapted so quickly to tramping through New Zealand bush when he migrated. The idea of travelling on foot was not new to him. It is possible, too, that the lifelong interest he took in boats of all shapes and sizes began as a small boy with observations of the barges on Regent's Canal, near his home, plying goods between Paddington (still a village at the time) and Limehouse on the Thames.

London's population in the first decades of the nineteenth century was just over a million – about a seventh of what it is today. If some districts were nevertheless cramped and ill-housed, St John's Wood was not one of them, as can be seen from the segment of the Greenwood brothers' 1827 map shown above. At one time Thomas Heaphy owned cottages near Alpha Road as well as his property in St John's Wood Road.

Whether or not one believes versatility is a trait that can be inherited, it was as notable a quality in Thomas as it was in his younger son. According to his obituarist in the Gentleman's Magazine, Thomas 'was equally at home if quarrying for stone, or constructing a pleasure-boat, or building a house, or devising an improved axle, or laying down a railway'. Born in the London parish of Cripplegate on 29 December 1775, Thomas was apprenticed as a boy to a dyer in the silk industry, but after a few months his indentures were cancelled and he was then articled to the engraver John Mitchell Meadows. The exacting work of copying images on to copper plates for printing seems not to have been wholly congenial to his restless and ambitious spirit either, for soon he was taking lessons at night to improve his skills as a painter. John Lewis Roget comments in his magisterial History of the 'Old Water-Colour' Society (1891), 'Heaphy, to whom the canvas was more attractive than the copper, used to spend the evenings, when he had done his master's work, at a place of instruction in art, somewhere in Finsbury, conducted by a painter of the name of Simpson.'

Simpson provided a route whereby Thomas could move beyond the rank of simple tradesman. At first, however, it was to scenes of working-class London street life that Thomas turned for inspiration. He painted fishmongers, vegetable-vendors, card-sharps, beggars and the like. With a sniff of disdain, the unidentified but intensely class-conscious and determinedly gentlemanly obituarist for the Gentleman's Quarterly remarks, 'Many of his productions certainly depicted scenes of low, or rather vulgar, life, the truth of which only rendered them more disgusting. Neither picturesque nor grand, as gypsies or banditti, the cadaverous groupes [sic] of a midnight cellar were rather repulsive than admirable. From this path, however, he directed his attention to a more profitable source; and turned his talents from the purlieus of St Giles's to the more elegant inhabitants of the precincts of St James's.'

Although this crisp chronology deftly sums up Thomas's drive for social advancement, it is a little inaccurate. Because his working-class scenes sold well, especially to the upwardly mobile, he continued to paint them even after he had become a favourite portraitist of titled heads. In the latter category he had an early success with his depiction of the Russian ambassador to England, Count Woronzow, which created sufficient interest at court for Thomas to be installed in 1803 as portrait painter to Caroline, Princess of Wales. Other illustrious commissions and appointments followed. In 1812 he accepted an invitation to accompany the commander of the British troops, Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington), to the Peninsular War as staff artist. During his time in Spain he made sketches of Wellesley and other high-ranking English officers in suitably dignified and valorous poses. Parallels with the subsequent career of his fifth child can be seen here in his willingness to engage in risky travel and put his art to propagandistic purposes.

Among the many works by Thomas Heaphy now housed at the National Portrait Gallery in London there is a full-length watercolour portrait of the Duke of Wellington, painted in 1813, which the catalogue describes with exemplary skill: 'Every inch the hero, Wellington cuts a dashing figure against a barren landscape, which alludes to the ruined battlefields he left in his victorious wake. He stands proudly by a shattered tree-trunk beneath a dramatic stormy sky as the wind whips at his coat tails. One hand rests on his elegant bowed sword and the other holds a telescope as he gazes imperially into the distance.'

When it came to delineating individual physiognomy, Charles Heaphy was never his father's equal. Nor, although he once claimed a sound enough grasp of anatomy to serve as coroner at a murder inquiry, was Charles ever as assured as his father when depicting the human form. He did, however, pick up some of Thomas's savvy in regard to emblematic props and backgrounds in his own full-length portraits. The New Zealand Company's flag of ownership flying to the right of the Maori chief Te Puni, the English ship sailing in behind Wharepouri, the careful balancing of Maori and European accoutrements in the study of Paul Marshall (Paora Matutaera) that includes the feathers of both the huia and the peacock in his hair – these are contrivances as cunning as Thomas's deployment of sword and telescope when glorifying the duke.

The nominal British head of state during the Peninsular War and the subsequent decisive victory against the French at Waterloo was George III, but the king's frequent fits of delirium (probably caused by the rare hereditary disease porphyria) and increasingly severe short-term memory loss made him incapable of ruling. The Prince of Wales took over as chief executive in 1811, nine years before the king's death. Stylish and clever, but incorrigibly self-indulgent, the Prince Regent took a keen interest in the arts. He is said to have paid Thomas Heaphy £1000 to paint a large, heroic, heavily populated panorama showing the Duke of Wellington giving orders to his generals prior to battle.

Thomas completed this assignment in 1816. His contemporaries spoke of it as his masterpiece. At a time of intense patriotic fervour, there was obvious commercial potential in reproducing the work. Setting any aversion to his former craft aside, Thomas carried out the necessary engraving himself and sold prints from his home at St John's Wood. The process took time, however. The prints were not ready for sale until 1822, by which stage the national rejoicing in triumph at Waterloo had cooled.

Growing up in an environment so devoted to the representation of military heroism might account, in part, for the tenacity later displayed by Charles in securing for himself the Victoria Cross. On a modest scale he followed the career path of the Iron Duke, drawing on soldierly success to enter politics. That Charles took one of his father's prints with him to New Zealand is evident from the mention of a 'Duke of Wellington staff engraving' in his widow's will.

By the beginning of the 1820s Thomas Heaphy had been a family man for many years. He married Mary Stevenson, the sister of a friend, at St Botolph's without Aldersgate Church on 27 November 1799. Although there is no firm documentary evidence, the first of their children, Mary Ann, seems likely to have been born about 1801. Their first son, named after his father and usually referred to as Thomas Frank by art historians to avoid confusion, arrived on 2 April 1813 (the date made certain by his own testimony in later life). Sometime between Mary Ann and Thomas Frank another girl was born, but nothing is known about her, not even her name. In 'The Other Heaphys', a valuable article on the family published in the Bulletin of New Zealand Art History in 1993, Pamela Gerrish Nunn conjectures that this otherwise anonymous daughter might be the 'Miss C. H. Heaphy' who is the subject of a miniature portrait painted by Mary Ann in 1821. Even if incorrect, these initials at least give us a means of referring to her. In terms of chronology, though not of talent, the junior members of the family were Elizabeth, born about 1815, and Charles, born about 1820. Today Charles's reputation exceeds hers, but throughout the Victorian era Elizabeth was the better-known artist.

With the possible exception of the elusive 'C. H.', Thomas Heaphy taught all his offspring to paint. Wherever Charles first went to school, we can be confident it was at his father's knee that he received his first instruction in drawing. As he was the runt of the litter, it is likely that his siblings assisted in his early artistic development. There were plenty of visitors to the house who might also have given expert advice, for Thomas knew most of the English watercolourists in London. Among his closer associates were the Varley brothers, John and Cornelius. In a letter of 11 October 1819 to John Linnell, William Blake refers to meeting John Varley 'at Mr Heaphy's house on Thursday'. That, unfortunately, was before Charles was born, so we are denied the gratifying iconography of the great visionary giving an avuncular pat on the head to the future creator of Mt Egmont from the southward. Perhaps, however, Blake called again in subsequent years, without documenting his visit.

Although Thomas Heaphy occasionally painted in oils, watercolours were his preferred medium. The idea of using water-soluble paints on parchment or paper dates back to the fifteenth century and early examples can be found throughout continental Europe. In England, however, the great flowering of interest in watercolour painting began in the second half of the eighteenth century and continued into the nineteenth century. Alexander Cozens (c. 1717–1786), Paul Sandby (c. 1731–1809) and Francis Towne (1740–1816) were the precursors, but the most powerful innovators were J. M. W. Turner and Thomas Girtin, both born, like Thomas Heaphy, in 1775. Another key practitioner, John Constable, was born the following year. As well as the giants, a host of lesser talents emerged and societies devoted to the art form were consequently formed.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century Thomas Heaphy belonged to the Society of Painters in Water Colours. In 1823 he founded and became the first president of the Society of British Artists. In 1831 he was active in founding the New Society of Painters in Water Colours, later known as the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours. He was, as his younger son would later be, a great joiner of clubs and guilds. Since he appears also to have been a great leaver, perhaps there was a tetchy and disputatious side to his nature.

Watercolour painting was clearly a topic much discussed in the Heaphy household, which helps explain why Charles, during his first years in New Zealand, was able to deploy a wide range of painterly techniques although barely out of his teens. It is a pity he recorded no impressions of his father's circle of friends. What, for example, did he make of John Varley? Was he familiar with and influenced by Varley's Practical Treatise on Perspective (1815) and Treatise on the Principles of Landscape Drawing (1821)? In his younger years, Thomas Heaphy also knew William Gilpin, the Oxford-educated vicar whose aesthetic theories were lampooned by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Gilpin died in 1804, long before Charles was born, but his principal publication, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape (1792) remained influential for decades to come. Was there a copy in the Heaphy household for Charles to read as a lad? If so, did he share Austen's mocking attitude towards the vicar's notions or ingest them in earnest? Alas, we can merely speculate.

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Excerpted from Heaphy by Iain Sharp. Copyright © 2008 Iain Sharp. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
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