This impressive-looking matron is my great-great-grandmother, Rosalie Schischka. She was one of a small group of immigrants from Bohemia in the Austrian Empire (now part of the Czech Republic) to the small village of Puhoi, north of Auckland, New Zealand. Along with the French settlement of Akaroa in the South Island, Puhoi is one of only a few distinctively European communities in New Zealand.
She appears here in a portrait painted of her by the world-famous-in-New Zealand nineteenth-century artist, Gottfried Lindauer. Like Mrs Schischka, Gottfried was a Bohemian immigrant to New Zealand, coming from the same area, Plzen (Pilsen). Both Gottfried and Rosalie, like their fellow travellers, were attracted by dreams of a better life, and, as it turned out, the tall tales of others who had already settled here. Like the similarly well-known paintings of Charles Frederick Goldie, Lindauer’s paintings are appreciated in the New Zealand art circles more for their historical and ethnographic value - though even that is apparently sketchy - than their artistic merit.
I only learned of the existence of this painting this past Christmas. My father told me that his great grandmother had been painted by Lindauer - apparently news to him also - and that she had recently been sold for an undisclosed sum. The date of sale was 10 November 2011, my daughter’s first birthday. Intrigued, I Googled her as soon as I got home. Now in the Fletcher Trust Collection, Rosalie features on their website. Having never seen a photograph of her, I was curious to see what she looked like. Not to mention find out more about how a humble Bohemian immigrant was transformed into a semi-famous artwork.
With a click of a mouse button, there she was. My great-great-grandmother. Rosalie Schischka (née Schindlerova. Given that this is the feminine form of Schindler, are we, I wonder, any relation?).
It’s hard to put into words what coming face to face with an unknown, and unseen, ancestress is like. It’s certainly not the same feeling as dispassionately appraising the work of a ‘journeyman painter’ who specialised in ‘romanticised images’, particularly of Mãori subjects, and portraits of people of substance (as Lindauer has been described). It’s an uncanny sensation, of someone walking over your grave ... or out of theirs.
Noting her age at the time of the painting - 73, and already widowed for 16 years - my first thought was the rather inconsequential ‘she must have had a good brand of hair-dye.’ Her tresses are still so improbably dark brown that they blend into the dim background. She wears mourning, adorned with two intricate pieces of gold jewellery, with dancing sparkles scattered around the top. Seed pearls, I guessed.
I searched her faces for traces of my own, but aside from the dark hair and eyes, I can’t see it. Putting my head to one side, and closing one eye, she maybe looks a bit like my dad, her great-grandson. Her face is fleshy and lined, but, for all that, she looks a youthful 73. While there are hints of impatience and not-suffering-fools around her mouth and eyes - perhaps there is a resemblance after all - there is also a slightly-raised left eyebrow. It’s as if she’s not at her ease, simultaneously thinking ‘hurry up and paint the picture already,’ and feeling tickled that she’s having her picture painted at all.
The blurb on the website - a little snidely, I think - says ‘this is a portrait of a woman of substance who went to some pains to ensure that her painted image reflected her status in the community.’ Hmmm, because it’s kind of crazy to get dressed up if someone’s going to paint your picture, right? Nor do the use of the tentative ‘probably’ and ‘probable’ suggest much knowledge of Rosalie’s life, nor of the community in which she lived. Most of the male immigrants from Bohemia were farm labourers, coal miners or town-labourers. Their wives cared for large families, while the single women were domestic servants and lace makers. And there are a couple of basic incorrect facts: the Schischkas arrived in Auckland in 1866, for example, not 1864, as stated.
I don’t have a huge amount of knowledge of Rosalie’s life, or that of the Puhoi community’s either. But I can try and imagine the life of the living, breathing woman represented in the painting. Rosalie travelled with her husband and seven children to the other side of the world, leaving familiarity, family and friends, on the strength of a handful of rosy-tinted letters. These letters glossed over the difficulty of the terrain, the lack of any facilities beyond what the earliest settlers had built themselves, the isolation of the community, and its almost exclusive initial dependence on the local Ngãti Rongo people.
Rosalie’s youngest child was two when she arrived in Auckland. I find a long car-trip with one toddler stressful enough. I can only imagine how difficult it must’ve been to cope with a large family, limited space and food, and the threat of typhus and typhoid fever, which killed four people on board. On arrival in New Zealand, her husband was held in debtor’s prison for three weeks as a result of various ‘misunderstandings’ over an early land purchase. I imagine Rosalie wondered what on earth she’d let herself in for ... and why on earth she’d let Lorenz talk her into this in the first place. I imagined her worst fears were confirmed when, on arrival in Puhoi, the first Bohemian immigrants there asked them, ‘what has brought you to this terrible place?’ Quick with his wits, her husband is said to have retorted, ‘Your letters.’
Like most early European immigrants to New Zealand, the Bohemians benefitted from the policies of settlement and alienation of Mãori land pursued by the Crown. The Schischkas received 220 acres - more land than they could ever have dreamed of owning in Bohemia - and established themselves as farmers. I suspect Rosalie’s later ‘status in the community’ was due to the hard work she and her family put in to making their farm a going concern, and, with others, helping to feed and provision the new community. Not long after they arrived, Rosalie had an eighth child. In addition to feeding, clothing, and educating her existing children, she now had to cope with pregnancy, birth and infancy in a new and unfamiliar place.
If she is not entitled to a little pride and self-satisfaction at the end of a hard life, then when would she be?
As you can tell, I had a somewhat defensive reaction to the way this picture is described on the Fletcher Trust Collection's website. My response is to the person in the picture as the subject of the painting, rather than its object. She is not just some old woman in a gloomy picture, indicative of the limitations of early New Zealand art, she is my great-great-grandmother. I found myself not only fascinated by her, but also feeling protective of her and wanting to shield her from the the distancing analysis of art critics. At moments, I even entertained thoughts of buying the picture myself - like Claire Huxtable in this episode of the Cosby Show - but the rumoured price-tag stretching into the thousands quickly extinguished those plans. Also, I don’t think it would match the carpet.
Why am I posting this ‘meditation on an artwork’ in a blog about feminism and motherhood? Because the unusual reaction I had to this painting reminded me of the marginalised histories of motherhood that various feminist writers have tried to uncover. It reminded me of the history of settlement in this country, where my ancestors and me are located in it and how we have benefitted from it. And it reminded me that portraiture, even the sentimentalised Victorian kind, can be a powerful means of engaging with the past, especially with our foremothers, without whom none of us would be here.
