His father, David Goldie, was a prominent timber merchant and politician, and a strict Primitive Methodist who resigned as Mayor of Auckland rather than toast the visiting Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York with alcohol.

Goldie studied art part-time under Louis John Steele,[1] after leaving school to work in his father's business.

They shared a studio and collaborated on the large painting The Arrival of the Māoris in New Zealand,[3][1][4] based on Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa.

Goldie trod a path established by Steele's Māori history paintings and portraits of tattooed chiefs.

Also influential was his brother William, who in 1901 wrote an article that contradicted predictions of the demise of the Māori and later the journalist and historian James Cowan.

On 31 October 1920 Goldie travelled to Sydney, where on 18 November at the age of 50 he married 35-year-old Olive Ethelwyn Cooper, an Australian by birth but a resident of Auckland.

Encouraged by the Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe, Goldie resumed painting around 1930; in 1934 and 1935 he exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, and in 1935, 1938 and 1939; the Salon of the Société des artistes français.

[16] Soon after, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, for services to art in New Zealand, in the 1935 King's Birthday and Silver Jubilee Honours.

[19] Earlier, NZ$530,000 ($589,625 including buyer's premium) was achieved for a Goldie work in an online auction conducted by Fisher Galleries.

[21] In 2022, a group of descendants of chief Kamariera Te Hau Takiri Wharepapa unsuccessfully attempted to raise the funds necessary to buy the painting at auction.

[22] In March 2024, six paintings by Goldie were sold at auction in Auckland from the collection of Mainfreight co-founder Neil Graham.