Colonial Constructs

How did the European settler perceive Māori? What images of Māori society and culture did European artists create for their distant audiences? What preconceptions and aesthetic models lay behind early European depictions of Māori? These are some of the questions explored by art historian Leonard Bell in this major study of the relationship between the visual representation of Māori and the ideology of colonialism. He explores the complex and unbalanced cultural interchange between Europeans and