CHARLES DECIMUS BARRAUD
Charles Barraud played a leading role in establishing the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts (1882), and in securing funds for its first gallery (1892). Barraud had arrived in Wellington in 1849 and established a chemist shop in Lambton Quay. He achieved early artistic recognition in New Zealand, holding an art union of sixty of his works in Lyttelton in 1852.
His profession as an artist during this period typified the development of colonial art with Barraud exhibiting in industrial exhibitions and, following the establishment of art societies in the main centres from the 1880s, with the Academy of Fine Arts and Canterbury Society of Arts.
In 1873 he visited England, preparing work for the publication, New Zealand Graphic and Descriptive (1877). Barraud’s romantic watercolours and portraits in oil, (including one of Maori chief Honiana Te Puni-kokopu), remain an important historical record of colonial settlement.
Barraud has works in the collections of the Hocken Library, Dunedin and the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.
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