Charles Goldie Biography | Oil Painting Reproductions

Charles Frederick Goldie went to Paris to study at the renowned Académie Julian which was a conservative institution, resistant to Impressionism and other cutting edge styles, so Goldie received a traditional, formal education in drawing and painting.

He returned to New Zealand in 1898 and built up the French Academy of Art with Louis J. Steele, who had been his painting tutor before his departure. They worked together on the large painting The Arrival of the Maoris in New Zealand, based on Jean Louis Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa. From 1901 he made trips to draw and photograph the indigenous Maori people in their villages, he also paid them to come to Auckland to sit for their portraits.

Charles Goldie's later works were from photographs, as his elderly models had passed on. Rumors that the paintings were produced with the help of a projection system are not borne out by comparing the paintings with the photographs.

Goldie's health deteriorated through a combination of lead poisoning, from the lead white paint used to prepare his canvases and alcoholism. He produced little work in the 1920s. Energized by the governor-general, Lord Bledisloe's encouragement to paint and not waste his talent by drinking, Charles Goldie resumed painting in 1930, and in 1934 and 1935 he exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and in the following years 1935, 1938 and 1939; the Salon of the Société des Artistes Français in Paris.

Charles Goldie's work has been criticized as "racist" and he held the Victorian states of mind he had grown up with that the Maori were a "dying race" and in many ways, sub-standard compared to Europeans. In 2016 the oil painting Portrait of Ngāti Manawa Chief Wharekauri Tahuna was sold for $1.175 Million, a new record for any painting sold at auction in New Zealand.

The art forger Karl Sim legally changed his name to Carl Feodor Goldie in the 1980s in order to be able to "legitimately" sign his Goldie copies C.F. Goldie (Charles Frederick Goldie). He was later convicted of art forgery and no longer tries to pass them off as original C.F. Goldie paintings. Sim published an autobiography in 2003 called Good as Goldie.

Artists Influencing Charles Goldie: Louis John Steele.
He Traveled To France, Australia, England, France.
Artist's Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.