‘The whitening snows of venerable elder’

‘The whitening snows of venerable elder’

The artist Charles Goldie painted a series of portraits of elderly Māori who were supposedly contemplating not only their past, but also the life span of their race. In the late 1800s and early 1900s many Europeans considered Māori to be dying out. Portraits such as this one, painted in 1914, helped to reinforce this view.