MY JOURNEY STARTS in the basement of Puke Ariki, Taranaki’s combined museum, library and visitor information centre. I want to gain some insight into how people in the past perceived the mountain. Head of research Ron Lambert rolled his eyes when I asked to see any paintings of the mountain the museum held, and brought me down here to the storage area. Taking a large archive box from a shelf, he says, “There are 200 by Bernard Aris alone. I’ve heard stories of him having half a dozen on the easel at the same time. He developed a very chocolate-box style in the 1860s and ’70s.”

The next featured artist in what turns out to be a production line of archive boxes is Edwin Harris. “He was a draughtsman for the New Plymouth Company, and one of the few artists to get the colour of the New Zealand bush right.”

I have noticed that many of the museum’s early photographs of the mountain have scorched-earth foregrounds—charred trees which stand out starkly against the snow-capped peak. Some paintings have stumps in them, too, though most artists have tended to downplay this aspect, focusing on more attractive landscape features.

“Here’s a William Fox,” says Ron, handing me a watercolour. Fox, a former prime minister, is reputed to have made the slowest ascent of the mountain. An ardent teetotaller, he wanted to prove that a man of 78 who abstained was a match for drunkards half his age. Sir William roped himself to a pole, which he embedded step by step into the loose scoria and thus pulled himself up. It took him 12 hours to reach the summit. Asked whether Sir William had proved his point, his guide, Harry Peters, commented that “the experience gained did not confirm the contention.”

As scores of paintings flow past, the degree to which the mountain is rooted in people’s experience of the province dawns on me. Also the degree to which people see what they want to see.

Early visions were romanticised, almost biblical in their grandeur. Some were painted for the purpose of recruiting settlers, Ron says—like glossy photos in a travel brochure. The breadth of depictions is remarkable, ranging from the exaggerated cloud-piercer in Charles Heaphy’s 1839 Mount Egmont from the Southward—a Matterhorn of steepness—to the more modest angles of Christopher Perkins’ 1931 Taranaki.

Perkins readily admitted that art was as much invention as depiction. “How much may design be allowed to distort material, and how much material is really needed for a rich yet economical effect?” he pondered as he sought for the right approach. He compared Taranaki’s form to that of Mt Fuji, and related the story of a Japanese vessel anchored in the port of New Plymouth whose crew made “daily obeisance to the honourable mountain.” In its abstract simplicity, Perkins’ Taranaki broke the mould of romanticised landscapes—its foreground is occupied by that quintessential Taranaki icon, a dairy factory.