A portrait of a Te Arawa chief that vanished from public view for more than a century has become the centre of a very public argument about whether it is the work of Charles Frederick Goldie at all. The painting, titled Lost in Thought, Ngāheke, An Arawa Chieftain, is being offered by the Christchurch dealer NZ artbroker with a price of about $420,000, and a public viewing is set down for Thursday 23 July. Before a single bid has been placed, six art experts and auctioneers have told RNZ they do not believe it is a genuine Goldie.
Four of those six had inspected the work in person over the past several years, which is what makes their doubts hard to wave away. Goldie is the most collected and, for that reason, the most imitated portrait painter in New Zealand history, so a rediscovered canvas carrying his name and a six-figure price invites close scrutiny. The stakes here are unusually high because the picture is not a minor study but a full portrait of a named rangatira, and because so much money now rests on the question of who actually held the brush.
The back story is the sort that makes a sale like this exciting in the first place. The painting was shown at the Canterbury Society of Arts annual exhibition in Christchurch in 1917 and then dropped out of sight for more than a hundred years, according to RNZ’s earlier report. It resurfaced in Australia in 2020, when it was bought from a Melbourne estate, before making its way back across the Tasman. The subject was a high-ranking chief and tohunga of the Tūhourangi Ngāheke people of Te Arawa, a man of great tapu because of his role preparing the bones of the dead for reburial. A lost portrait of such a figure, painted by Goldie, would be a genuine find.
The trouble is that several of the country’s most experienced Goldie watchers say the painting does not add up. Andrew Grigg, a director of the Auckland auction house Cordy’s, told RNZ he had refused to sell the work on the vendor’s behalf back in 2020. In his view, as he put it plainly, “the whole painting is not right.” He pointed in particular to the signature, which he described as thin and low quality, with a fold running through it at the bottom.
Sarah Hillary spent four decades as the principal conservator at Auckland Art Gallery and examined the painting in 2021 using infrared and ultraviolet light, the standard tools for looking beneath a paint surface. She told RNZ the brushwork was far more visible than she would expect from Goldie, and that the tā moko, the facial markings, looked as though they had simply been floated onto the face rather than built into it. Phillip Waddington, an artist who has studied Goldie for more than fifty years, went further, describing the handling as the work of a novice. He also flagged the frame, an oak frame from the Wellington firm McGregor Wright, when Goldie usually framed his portraits in kauri from a particular Auckland gallery. Small details like a frame maker matter enormously in authentication, because a genuine artist tends to be consistent about the workshops they use.
Perhaps the most telling point is that another well-known auctioneer, Dunbar Sloane, had listed the painting himself in 2024, then pulled it after inspecting it in person and coming away unconvinced. When a saleroom walks away from a potential six-figure commission, it is not a decision taken lightly. Two further experts contacted by RNZ said they were uneasy about the way the hand had been painted, with one commenting that it did not resonate as Goldie to them in any sense.
The dealer offering the work has not backed away from it. Jen McBride, a director of NZ artbroker, told RNZ the painting had been examined by several experts, among them Dr Leonard Bell, a former associate professor in art history at the University of Auckland, and that matching the picture to its original catalogue entry and recovering its title had been a major step in building the case for it. She said the work had been, in her words, “hopping around and seeing a number of experts, looking at its conservation, its history, finding its original title and finding it in the catalogue.” Faced with the doubts now being aired, she said that given the media speculation she would fully support further forensic testing.
That offer points to the real difficulty at the heart of the dispute. Authenticating a Goldie has become harder in recent years, not easier, because the pool of people with the eye and the archive knowledge to make a firm call has shrunk. Roger Blackley, the art historian widely regarded as the definitive authority on Goldie, died in 2019, and no single figure has clearly taken his place. That leaves a genuine painting and a clever imitation being judged by a scattered group of specialists who do not always agree, which is exactly the situation now playing out in public.
Goldie forgeries are not a hypothetical worry. The most famous case is that of Karl Sim, who spent years turning out convincing fakes and was eventually convicted of forgery in the mid 1980s, later cheerfully changing his name by deed poll to Carl Feodor Goldie. His shadow hangs over every rediscovered canvas, and it is part of why buyers at this level expect a watertight chain of evidence before they commit. None of the experts quoted by RNZ has suggested this particular painting is a Sim, and no allegation of deliberate deception has been levelled at anyone in the current sale. The question being asked is narrower and, in the art world, entirely ordinary, which is simply whether the hand that made this portrait was Goldie’s.
For now the painting remains listed, the viewing remains scheduled, and the two sides remain some distance apart. A buyer who believes the dealer’s case could be acquiring a lost masterpiece for a price that, if the attribution holds, might look modest in a few years. A buyer who sides with the sceptics would be paying a great deal for a mystery. Whichever way it falls, the affair is a reminder that in the market for New Zealand’s most sought after painter, a signature and a good story are never quite enough on their own.
What do you make of it, would you bid on a rediscovered Goldie when the experts are split, or does the doubt make it a walk away. Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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