A Nation's Portraits

Résumé du livre

A Nation's Portraits, by Roger Blackley, offers fascinating insights into a history of portraiture in New Zealand. Rather than restricting himself to an examination of elite portraits in a number of repsoitories, he explores a range of historical and contemporary venues, from the window displays of nineteenth-century photography studios to Henry Partridge's Lindauer Art Gallery of Maori portraits on Auckland's Queen Street, to the hallowed halls of Parliament and the busy corridors of his own university. His purpose here is to ask probing questions about the place of New Zealand's rich heritage of official and unofficial portraits. As a result, Blackley has made a timely and relevant contribution to the historical task of examining art's vital role in shaping the nation.