A portrait of a kuia believed to be from Kihikihi has been in the Meltzer whānau for around 50 years, but the current family custodian wants to return it to her people.
Painted by celebrated Waikato artist Ida Carey, the portrait is of a kuia smoking a pipe.
Paul Meltzer is on a mission to find the whānau of the woman in the painting, saying it isn’t his to keep.
“[I’ve] just looked after it, but I never really wanted to hang it in our house. I just wanted to keep my own whānau photos on the wall and [it] just didn’t quite feel right,” he said.
He started searching for her whānau two years ago, using Google to look up the artist, Ida Carey, which led him to an art gallery in Hamilton named for her.
“I spoke to the curator. I sent her the photo [of the painting] and she was the one who told me about the name at the back of it, the lady’s name, but it’s very hard to read. And then I had another museum in Palmerston, and then Te Awamutu as well.”
He said attempts had been made to decipher the scrawl at the back.
“[It’s] pretty hard to read, it’s faded over the last 40 or 50 years. So, we’ve got ‘Mrs Mihi’, can’t really make out the middle name, but we think it’s ‘Taurangi’ [and] ‘Kohitu’, and then the word, ‘Kihikihi’, so we presume she was from that area.”
He added: “I really just want to give it back to the whānau, whether it goes to the marae or iwi down Tainui way. But, yeah, just would like to really give it back to the whānau.”
A quick search online of “Kohitu” revealed listings for a Kirikino Kohitu Epiha who featured in many historical photos and paintings, but it was unclear whether this was the same kuia.
A gift from the artist
Ida Carey was well-known for her portraits of Māori men, women and children — producing hundreds in her lifetime. She convened the first meeting of the Waikato Society of Arts alongside Adeline Younghusband in 1934. An art gallery at the Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato was named in recognition of Carey’s contribution to art in the region. She died in 1982, aged 90.
She gifted many of her paintings, including the one in Paul’s possession.
“She wouldn’t actually sell the original paintings, so a lot of them were gifted and she gifted this painting to my grandmother,” he said.
When Paul’s grandmother died, the portrait went to his father, and Paul inherited the painting when his father passed.
