Heaphy / Iain Sharp.

Charles Heaphy was an artist, explorer, surveyor and soldier. The first New Zealander to win the Victoria Cross.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 210-222) and index.

Reading the face -- Young Charles -- Company man -- Explorer -- Auckland years -- Gallant major -- Adjudicator and his after-life.

"The first New Zealander to win the Victoria Cross, the first Pakeha to explore the West Coast of the South Island and New Zealand's most distinguished nineteenth-century landscape painter: by any measure, Charles Heaphy was a central figure in colonial New Zealand. In this engaging book, lavishly illustrated with Charles Heaphy's paintings, drawings and maps, Iain Sharp reveals the story of Heaphy's art and life." "From his earliest surviving watercolour of birdlife in the Marlborough Sounds in August 1839 to his last known sketch on the back of an envelope, showing Maori witnesses at a Native Land Court hearing in Palmerston North in December 1879, Charles Heaphy's paintings and drawings represent a remarkable visual diary of life in settler New Zealand. The works are without parallel in their evocative richness and have influenced many twentieth century New Zealand artists." "Drawing on newspapers, diaries and letters as well as Heaphy's art, Sharp depicts a man who embodied the contradictions of Pakeha life in New Zealand. Heaphy could be both a dreamy romantic and a self-serving opportunist, a man able to shoot a wild pig one day and discourse to a scholarly audience on geological science the next, someone who became almost as familiar with the New Zealand back country as his Maori companions while thinking all the time of Europe." "In charting the course of Heaphy's extraordinary life as artist, explorer, surveyor and soldier, Sharp tells us much about the culture and history of New Zealand."--Jacket.

Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2009 Biography Finalist.