The grandeur of Fiordland captures the imagination of New Zealanders and visitors from overseas. It is the most wild place in New Zealand, and one wildest in the world. It is a landscape formed by the forces of water with large fiords carved…
Heaphy
In 1840 the surveyor Charles Heaphy painted this watercolour of Mount Taranaki. The painting places center stage the mountain’s perfect conical form, that is ringed with forest and a foreground made up of flat, green land. It portrays to a prospective settler an empty, fertile land lying in wait of European hands to transform it from wilderness into cultivated farmland. This form of painting, known as ‘boosterism’ actively sold the prospect of settlement ton people living on the other side of the globe.
Heaphy, Charles, 1820-1881 :Mt Egmont from the southward, September 1840
Image © National Library of New Zealand