From William Hodges’s View of Matavai Bay (1776) to Simon Gende’s Captn Cook in Australia (2018): the aesthetic of Pacific exploration and encounter in the 18th century and beyond

Captain Cook’s voyages gained fame among the British and European public not only through the publication of Cook’s amended journals by Hawkesworth and Douglas, but also thanks to the countless visual evidence that was collected during the expeditions, either in the form of cultural artifacts and ethnographic objects, or sketches, paintings, watercolours and drawings made by the artists during the three expeditions between 1768 and 1779 (Sydney Parkinson and Alexander Buchan for the first voyage, William Hodges for the second and John Webber for the third expedition). The popularity of the visual imagery of the voyages cannot be underestimated. Providing the public with accurate depictions of the flora, fauna and inhabitants of the Pacific, together with a minute recording of their customs and ceremonies, this visual material held a scientific value that came as a complement to the various journals kept by the naturalists and Cook himself (such as the Forsters’ or Joseph Banks’s journals). The iconography of the Pacific was thus made available to the public through James Cook’s published journals and those of other members of the voyages, such as Sydney Parkinson’s. Numerous images of Pacific landscapes and Islanders also appeared in periodicals of the time, reaching out to a wider audience. The public’s enduring thirst for visual information about Pacific exoticism is further evidenced in the decorative scheme chosen by Philippe de Loutherbourg for the sets of John O’Keeffe’s pantomime Omai, or a Trip round the World (1785), performed between December 1785 and 1788. In the pantomime, the costumes and stage-setting followed William Hodges’s and John Webber’s works, while it has been established that Loutherbourg also acquired authentic costumes from the Pacific that served his quest for exactness in the sartorial display of the Pacific on stage.[1]

This essay explores the variations in the historiography of Cook’s voyages between the eighteenth century and the present time through visual stories told by pictorial representations of the discovery of the Pacific and of encounters between indigenous peoples and Cook’s crew. I will first look at the entanglement between science and romance seen in the artistic productions made during the three voyages and at how it reflects the cultural and aesthetic tastes of the artists and the public. My discussion will then move to a study of the cultural politics at work in contemporary Indigenous art that deals with Cook’s voyages. I would like to show the ways in which the voyages’ visual and written material has been used, recycled, manipulated and appropriated. I will take case studies to show how postcolonial art offers challenging views on the terra nullius doctrine,[2] discusses racial stereotypes and reconsiders the legacy of Captain Cook’s Pacific exploration.

Visualising the Pacific: the quest for exactness

The first expedition (1768-1771) was both a scientific and a political mission. It received the patronage of the Royal Society and secret orders from the Admiralty: Cook was to observe the transit of Venus and look for a hypothetical Southern continent. For the first time ever, a team of scientists led by Joseph Banks embarked on board the Endeavour. On 10 August 1768, the then president of the Royal Society, James Douglas, Earl of Morton, addressed his Hints to Cook before his departure. This letter delineates the scientific goals of the mission and provides guidelines for the expedition. Observing local fauna and flora, meeting new peoples, recording their habits, sketching their features, and collecting natural samples, were all part of the empirical method prescribed by Douglas, and corresponded to the Royal Society’s tenets that had been explained by Thomas Sprat in his History of the Royal Society (1667):

If the Ship should fortunately discover any part of a well inhabited Continent, many new subjects in Natural History might be imported […]. The natural Dispositions of the peoples; their progress in Arts or Science, Especially their Mechanics, Tools, and manner of using them; – Their notions of Astronomy […] are principal objects of attention […] Next, the Character of their Persons, Features, Complection [sic], Dress, Habitations, Food, Weapons […].

Lastly their natural productions of the Country in the Animal, Vegetable and Mineral Systems. […] In general where an animal is to be described or figured, the name by which it goes in the Country, with all circumstances that can be collected relating to its nature, disposition, and character, should be minutely noticed.[3]

Cook’s first journal reflects the scientific ambitions of the mission as revealed in his factual, measured, neutral and detached style. Among the famous episodes recorded by James Cook and Joseph Banks in similar terms in their respective journals, the first encounter with the kangaroo in New Holland is described in highly scientific terms where dimensions are given as well as comparisons with known animals such as the rabbit or the jerboa. Sydney Parkinson’s two sketches[4] of the animal offer a visual accompaniment to the written description and capture the kangaroo in motion: 

[O]ne of the Animals before spoke of, it was a small one of the sort only weighing 28 pounds clear of the entrails. The head neck and shoulders of this Animal was very small in proportion to the other parts; the tail was nearly as long as the body, thick next the rump and tapering towards the end; the fore legs were 8 Inch long and the hind 22, its progression is by hoping or jumping 7 or 8 feet at each hop upon its hind legs only, for in this it makes no use of the fore, which seem to be only design’d for scratching in the ground &c.[5]

While scientific precision was crucial in the drawings and paintings made by the artists of the three voyages, the aesthetics of the picturesque and the sublime were also used to convey a visual transcription of some of the discoveries. Although trained in painting fauna and flora, Sydney Parkinson provided many coastal profiles and landscapes during the first expedition, after the premature death of landscape artist Alexander Buchan in Tahiti. Parkinson’s landscapes show picturesque qualities where natural elements are dramatized in visually interesting scenes, usually framed by different grounds and abounding in vivid details of indigenous life, as can be seen in his View of a curious Arched Rock, having a River running under it (1773) in Tolaga Bay, on the east coast of New Zealand[6] . Here, the unusual rock formation would have led viewers to reflect on the relationship between art and nature, while the small boat that can be made out in the distance also invited connoisseurs to admire the local colour of Maori life.

On 24 October 1769, in Tolaga Bay, Joseph Banks recorded the discovery of an impressive, rare natural setting composed of an immense arched rock. The scene offers an opportunity for considerations on the aesthetic of the picturesque in relation to the work of the imagination:

We saw also as [sic] extraordinary natural curiosity. In pursuing a valley bounded on each side by steep hills we on a sudden saw a most noble arch or Cavern through the face of a rock leading directly to the sea, so that through it we had not only a view of the bay and hills on the other side but an opportunity of imagining a ship or any other grand object opposite to it. It was certainly the most magnificent surprise I have ever met with, so much is pure nature superior to art in these cases: I have seen such places made by art where from an appearance totally inland you was led through an arch 6 feet wide and 7 high to a prospect of the sea, but here was an arch 25 yards in length, 9 in breadth and at least 15 in hight.[7]

This particular scene was drawn by Sydney Parkinson in his View of an Arched Rock on the Coast of New Zealand, with an Hippa or Place of Retreat on the Top of it (1769).[8] The picturesque detail of a Maori Hippa (fort) on top of the rock was a source of wonder and admiration to Banks who recorded on 12 November 1769 going “ashore to see and Indian Fort or Eppah” for which he gave a long description:

[T]he most beautiful romantic thing I ever saw, it was built on a small rock, detached from the Main & Surrounded at high Water, the top of this was fenced round with Rails after their manner, but was not large enough to contain above 5 or 6 houses; the whole appeared totally inaccessible to any animal who was not furnish’d with wings, indeed it was only approachable by one very narrow & steep path, but what made it most truly romantic was that much the largest part of it was hollow’d out into an arch which penetrated quite thro’ it, & was in hight [sic] not less than 20 Yards perpendicular above the Water which ran thro’ it.[9]

As Bernard Smith has noted, in addition to a scientific, accurate recording of nature which was in keeping with the requirements of the Royal Society, the aesthetic of the picturesque often came into play in the pictorial representations of Pacific landscapes.[10] Joseph Banks’s description combines scientificity – shown for example in the precise measurements he gives of the arch’s dimensions – with a reflection on the picturesque in nature. The scene in Tolaga Bay offers aesthetic reactions to the picturesque, such as a sense of surprise and admiration. The natural arched rock suggests a comparison between nature and architecture (“a most noble arch of Cavern”). The view at Tolaga bay opens up a visual and mental space to stimulate the imagination – the word “romantic” is used twice here – and offers a reflection on the relationship between art and nature, a theme that was much discussed in the circles of connoisseurs and artists in Britain at the time.[11]

The desire for new, curious and sensational images of the Pacific sometimes led to the publication of prints that read as collages of various scenes, aiming at bringing a plethora of picturesque details to the curious reader. Such was the case with The Representation of a singular View in New Zealand, with a War Canoe under a natural-arched Rock, published in The London Magazine in 1773. This image offers a juxtaposition of Parkinson’s A War Canoe, of New Zealand[12] and of his View of an Arched Rock, on the Coast of New Zealand; with an Hippa, or Place of Retreat, on the Top of it, and it is completed by a copy of George Stubbs’s Kangaroo.[13] Here the latter appears as an inaccurate Australian quotation in a New Zealand landscape but adds a picturesque detail to what was perceived as Pacific exoticism. William Hodges, who accompanied Cook on his second mission, famously captured the beauty and drama of Pacific landscapes. He offered an original pictorial formula to translate the exoticism of the Pacific, in particular the specific effect of tropical light. At the same time, his Pacific opus also fitted well within the European tradition of landscape painting of his time, poised between classicism and romanticism.

William Hodges’s hybridity: the aesthetic of the exotic from Rome to Raiatea

Geoffrey Quilley has suggested that William Hodges’s style can be seen as that of an empiricist with a keen interest in the rendition of light, whose works offered a wealth of ethnographic data.[14] The artist’s famous General view of the Island of Otaheite (1775)[15] provides a case in point as three different types of boats are presented, ranging from the small sailing canoe on the far left to the war canoe on the far right, a subject which would have undoubtedly been of interest to the Admiralty and to a nation turned towards maritime expansion. Here Hodges offers to render the tropical light of Tahiti with vivid colours and parts with the more subdued chromatic style of Claude Lorrain’s and Richard Wilson’s landscape paintings. In other instances, William Hodges revisits the tradition of history painting in his Pacific scenes. In a View of Maitavie Bay, Otaheite (1776),[16] the artist blends the contemporary narration of the second expedition with a more a-temporal rendering of the event as he transforms a Tahitian landscape and testimony of an encounter into an almost, but not quite, history painting.

The sense of narration of the expedition’s story is rendered through the presence of The Resolution and The Adventure moored in the bay amid local boats carrying local islanders, while the crew’s tent can be seen on the shore in the background. Although the scene refers to a particular moment of the expedition, Hodges has added a European woman and her child to the picturesque setting, which evokes the classical rules of composition used by Claude Lorrain or Richard Wilson. Hodges blends the exotic with classical conventions, with a view, maybe, to presenting a point of comparison between the primitivism of Tahiti and that of ancient Rome and Greece, the subject of various debates in Europe since Bougainville’s naming of the island “la Nouvelle Cythère”.[17] In recording and at the same time transforming the landscape and its inhabitants by using decipherable codes, Hodges also implements an act of possession and appropriation, framing an alien, foreign landscape.

In addition to picturesque elements, William Hodges also conveyed the aesthetic of the sublime in certain scenes. A View of Cape Stephens in Cook’s Straits with Waterspout (1776)[18] offers a visual response to the awe-inspiring description of waterspout phenomena recorded in Georg Forster’s journal:

On a sudden a whitish spot appears on the sea in that quarter, and a column arose out of it, looking like a glass tube; another seemed to come down from the clouds to meet this, and they made a coalition, forming what is commonly called a water-spout. […] Our situation during all this time was very dangerous and alarming; a phenomenon which carried so much terrific majesty in it, and connected as it were the sea with the clouds, made our oldest mariners uneasy and at a loss how to behave […]. We prepared indeed for the worst, by cluing up topsails; but it was the general opinion that our masts and yards must have gone to wreck if we had been drawn into the vortex.[19]

The extract recalls the category of the sublime described by Edmund Burke in the presence of danger, obscurity and a feeling of awe in front of nature’s greatness and indomitable productions.[20] Here Forster conveys the hopelessness of the crew caught in the middle of waterspouts, as well as a sense of awe in front of nature’s “terrific majesty”. In his painting of the event, Hodges’s rendering of the sublime is conveyed through darkness, immensity, the contrast in scale, the flashes of lightning, the Maori Pa (fortified settlement), a reminder of fortified castles in Wilson or Lorrain’s paintings, which stands isolated and threatened by lightning at the top of a distant cliff.

As suggested by John McAleer, the presence of the couple that stands in the foreground, a woman with European features holding a baby, and a man pointing to the ship, invites the viewer to move from the immediate narration of the event to a more philosophical interpretation of the scene.[21] Evoking the Flood in the Bible, the scene offers a tour de force in combining a sense of picturesque exoticism with a more general reflection on the universality of mankind’s reaction in front of formidable natural phenomena.

Postcolonial re-imaging

One of the founding moments in the colonial history of Australia is James Cook’s “Declaration of Possession” that took place on 22 August 1770 when, accompanied by Banks and Solander, he took possession of the eastern coast of New Holland on a small island named thereafter Possession Island:

[T]he Eastern Coast from the Latitude of 38° South down to this place I am confident was never seen or visited by any European before us, and Notwithstand I had in the Name of His Majesty taken possession of several places upon this coast, I now once more hoisted English Coulers and in the name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern Coast from above Latitude down to this place by the name of New South Wales, together with all the Bays, Harbours Rivers and Islands situated upon the said coast, after which we fired three Volleys of small Arms which were Answerd by the like number from the Ship.[22]

This performative moment of taking possession of Australian land has inspired many indigenous artists in works questioning the status and recognition of native Australians in the country’s national history. In Vincent Namatjira’s James Cook – with the Declaration (2014),[23] Cook’s naval uniform appears as a metaphor of British law and naval power, where text and textile are interwoven, for the uniform morphs into the Declaration. The spectral presence of Cook in collective and personal memory is pervasive in Namatjira’s work: “it was the beginning of our shared history, everything after Cook was between all of us.”[24] The painter often uses humour to desacralise and revisit figures of imperial history. In Cook’s dinner party (2015),[25] Cook and the painter are seen sharing a meal, mostly sea food and fruit: Cook eats a prawn with his hands while Namatjira uses cutlery, maybe an allusion to the opposition between the civilised and the savage that is being reversed here. The title’s pun on Cook and “cooking” suggests that Cook has invited the artist for dinner, a modern re-enactment of the various meals shared by Cook and the chiefs of Pacific islands during his three voyages. If Cook is seen putting a friendly hand on Namatjira’s back, a common gesture symbolizing Australian mateship between the two men, the scene is also reminiscent of the many episodes of shared meals recorded by Cook in his journals. In Huahine Cook and the Chief Oree had shared a meal: “The Chief sit at Table with us and made a hearty Meal. […] it shewes that Friendship is Sacred with these people.”[26] The bottle on the table, labeled “Cook”, might also point to the crew’s practice of sharing wine with the chiefs. In Raiatea, “The Chief never faild to drink his glass of Madeira whenever it came to his turn”.[27] When arriving in New Holland in April 1770, Cook had noticed that shellfish was the staple diet of the inhabitants: “On the Sand and Mud banks are Oysters, Muscles, Cockles etc which I beleive as the cheif support of the inhabitants”.[28] In Cook’s dinner party, the presence of fruit, shellfish, in particular a crayfish (or lobster) on the table, recalls and recycles Tupaia’s drawings of Banks and a Maori exchanging tapa cloth for a crayfish, a scene of friendly encounter and exchange.[29] The painting works as a palimpsest using textual and visual material gathered during the voyages. It can be seen as a modern re-enactment of scenes of encounter that anchors Cook’s voyages of exploration into the complex narrative of Australian history.

The legacy of Cook’s voyages has been explored in several confrontational ways by various indigenous artists, in particular the terra nullius doctrine and the subsequent expropriation of aboriginal land by white settlers. Artist Jason Wing, for example, denounced Cook’s heroic mythification: “there are many politically correct terms (used to describe the arrival of Cook in Australia) such as colonised, peacefully settled, occupied or discovered. […] the truth is that Australia was stolen by armed robbery”.[30] His bust of Captain James Crook, made in 2013, transforms the latter into a gangster, inviting us to reconsider the colonial strands of the historiography of the voyages. In a similar fashion, Maori artist Steve Gibbs, in his work Name Changer (2016), challenges the heroic, Eurocentric historiography of the voyages by showing the erasure of Maori culture in the colonial process of re-naming indigenous places with English names.[31] The Kowhaiwhai pattern that takes up the upper half of the paper can be interpreted as a gesture to reclaim Maori identity over a sinking Endeavour placed in the lower part of the drawing. On a red strip running across the centre, one can see the Maori names used by Gibbs’s ancestors for the area renamed Poverty Bay by James Cook. The Endeavour appears upside down amid the ocean, a blue background where one makes out nails, beads, pieces of metal, a dog and fish that all allude to bartering between the crew and the Maoris. According to Steve Gibbs: “Everything we did was the complete opposite to their norm. The reality, however, is that Cook and his crew were the ones out of sync”.[32] New Zealand’s early colonial history is being challenged here, since the artist reclaims the aboriginality of New Zealand by turning the landscape upside down, sinking the Endeavour into Maori water and returning to the original Maori names of his land.

Papua New Guinean artist Simon Gende chose to tell the arrival of the Endeavour on the Australian coast in his work Captn Cook in Australia (2018) where Aboriginal men are seen attacking Cook and defending their territory with spears.[33] Here, Gende has also symbolically donned Cook’s ship with the colours of the Aboriginal flag. The painting challenges the legal history of terra nullius and can be read as a visual recollection and reconstruction of the first hostile contacts that had been recorded by Cook in his journal on 29 April 1770:

[A]s we approached the shore they all made off except two Men who seemd resolved to oppose our landing. […] We then threw them some nails beeds etc a shore which they took up and seem’d not ill pleased in so much that I thought that they beckon’d to us to come a shore; but in this we were mistaken, for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us upon which I fired a musket between the two which had no other effect than to make them retire back where bundles of their darts lay, and one of them took up a stone and threw at us which cause my fireing a second Musquet load with small shott, and although some of the shott struck the man yet it had no other effect than to make him lay hold of a Shield or target to defend himself. Emmidiatly after this we landed which we had no sooner done than they throw’d two darts at us, this obliged me to fire a third shott soon after which they bothe made off […].[34]

Australian artist Gordon Bennett also denounced the terra nullius doctrine and Australia’s colonial history by deconstructing the mythification of Australia’s beginnings, often seen as originating in Cook’s arrival in New Holland followed by the arrival of the first settlement in 1788, and celebrated in events such as Australia Day. In Possession Island (1991), Gordon Bennett reinvents and revisits Samuel Calvert’s etching Captain Cook Taking Possession of the Australian Continent on Behalf of the British Crown, AD 1770 (1865), a copy of the lost painting of the same title made by John Alexander Gilfillan in 1857.[35] Calvert’s etching was published in the Illustrated Sydney News and reproduced in school textbooks, and served as a visual transposition of nineteenth-century imperial history. The performative claim for possession is enacted by the firing of the gun, the music being played and the flag being planted. As Desmond Manderson points out: “Conquest is treated as a legal fact not a social discourse, through ritual actions. The hoisting of the colours in the name of the king, the show of force and the military parade, […] even the celebratory tipple to follow, are all ritual actions.”[36] The presence of a black servant waiting upon the conquerors and offering refreshments serves as a silent witness to the scene.

Bennett’s painting overwrites Calvert’s topic. In Bennett’s work, the Aborigines of the original image have been erased, and the black servant remains the sole witness to the scene. He is, in fact, the only one not to be obliterated by the dots or lashed by paint, and he wears the colours of the Aboriginal flag whilst Cook, Banks and other members of the crew have a spectral quality and are made to disappear under the several layers of paint. The black servant appears in front of a geometrical grid, entrapped, as it were, in a Western perspectival system that stands for the colonial ideology here. He stands for colonized subjects of the British Empire, in Africa, the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand. In Possession Island, Gordon Bennett also drew inspiration from abstract and expressionist artist Jackson Pollock’s drip painting. Aboriginal dot painting here meets abstract expressionism to write over the traditional narrative of imperial history. Pollock’s abstract style was inspired by native American Indian sand painting, and Gordon Bennett chose to blend Aboriginal dot painting with Indian indigenous painting to provide a global vision of art history that goes beyond Western art and encompasses First Nations’ art. This revisiting and rewriting of Calvert’s iconic moment of possession also allows for a reconsideration of the historiography of Cook’s voyages.

Conclusion

In The Ship, Simon Barker has summarized the evolution of scholarship on Cook’s voyages and on their legacy:

Captain Cook has been lauded as a founding father of modern Australia and New Zealand and celebrated as an icon of discovery and exploration. […] In recent years, however, Cook has become a more ambivalent figure […] a symbol of the colonialism, dispossession and oppression that sometimes followed in the wake of his explorations.[37]

First contacts between native populations of the Pacific and European crews need to be assessed not just in terms of violence and hostility, but also in terms of mutual discovery. Margaret Jolly and Serge Tcherkézoff have suggested that the notion of encounter should perhaps be preferred to that of contact to take into consideration the productive hybridity that resulted from multifarious exchanges:

[E]ven in the midst of massacre and revenge, there was a meeting of meanings, of bodies and minds, whereby pre-existing understandings, preconceptions from both sides of the encounter, were engaged, brought into confrontation and dialogue, mutual influence and ultimately mutual transformation.[38]

Hybridity is a notion that Maori artist Michel Tuffery chose to emphasise in a series of paintings entitled First Contacts that revisits the historiography of the voyages and the heroic figure of Cook.[39] In Cookie in Conversation with Tupaia at Tolaga Bay (2011), The Endeavour appears in the background, whilst Cook is featured with Polynesian characteristics: he is tattooed and dressed in a hybrid style, wearing a Hawaiian cloak made of feathers on top of his uniform. In Cook’s shadow, one can see the imaginary figure of Tupaia whispering in Cook’s ear. Tuffery has recycled one of Parkinson’s famous portraits of a Maori warrior[40] to depict Tupaia for whom no portrait is known. The painting appears as a collage of various iconic tropes recalling Cook’s voyages – the landscape, the portrait of Cook, and that of Parkinson’s Maori warrior – that are recycled to comment on a sense of proximity between two exceptional navigators coming from opposite sides of the globe, that have become doubles. In this painting, Tuffery invites us to acknowledge Tupaia’s role in steering The Endeavour across Polynesia and initiating the first contacts with the Maoris (is he not whispering instructions to Cook, guiding the captain’s steps and his ship into unknown waters and territories?). Tuffery is also alluding to the transformative process of the conversations, or frictions – sometimes friendly and sometimes more oppositional – that occurred during the voyages. Here, he depicts not Cook, but Tute (nicknamed Cookie), one of the most famous British explorers gone native. As shown in these various examples, the postcolonial “re-imaging” of the first encounters between Cook’s crew and indigenous men and women provides contrapuntal readings to Cook’s and Banks’s journals that also reflect the evolution of the historiography of the voyages. Contemporary indigenous art reveals not one single interpretation of these first encounters, but a polyphonic discourse on the legacy of Cook’s voyages.

aleyrac.jpg
Michel Tuffery MNZM, Cookie in Conversation with Tupaia at Tolaga Bay, 2011, / Acrylic on Canvas / h.1000 x w. 1000mm / private collection, Aotearoa New Zealand. (fees waived by Michel Tuffery for this volume)

Notes de pied de page

  1. ^ See William Huse, "A Noble Savage on the Stage", Modern Philology, 33.3, Feb. 1936, p. 303-316.
  2. ^ The doctrine of terra nullius (meaning "nobody's land") allowed European colonial powers to take possession of a territory that was perceived as "empty". Refusing to acknowledge Aboriginal peoples' rights to land, Britain claimed possession of Australia according to this principle. For more information, see Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding, Les voyages du capitaine Cook (1768-1779), Neuilly-sur-Seine, Atlande, 2020, p. 193-203.
  3. ^ Douglas J., fourteenth Earl of Morton, Hints offered to the consideration of Captain Cooke, Mr Bankes, Dr Solander and the other gentlemen who go upon the expedition on board the Endeavour 10 Aug 1768. Manuscript Collection, MS 9. National Library of Australia. p. 7-8.
  4. ^ https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/first-european-drawing-of-a-kangaroo (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  5. ^ James Cook, The Journals, ed. Philip Edwards [1999], London, Penguin Classics, 1999; 2003. 14 July 1770, p.153
  6. ^ https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/269371.html (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  7. ^ Joseph Banks, The Endeavour Journals of Joseph Banks: 1768-1771, ed. J.C Beaglehole, Melbourne, Angus and Robertson, 1962, vol. 1, p. .419.
  8. ^ https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/269373.html (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  9. ^ J. Banks, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 419.
  10. ^ Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed., New Haven, Yale University Press, 1985, p.1-7.
  11. ^ For more information on the "art-and-nature" debate, see Alain Bony, « Du discours du jardin au silence du sublime: le proche et le lointain dans l'esthétique paysagère d'Addison », Revue de la Société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 52, 2001, p. 94-100.
  12. ^ https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/269379.html (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  13. ^ For a copy of these images and a more detailed analysis, see Jocelyn Anderson, "Elegant Engravings of the Pacific: Illustrations of James Cook's Expeditions in British Eighteenth-Century Magazines", British Art Studies, Issue 7, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-07/janderson (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  14. ^ Geoffrey Quilley, "William Hodges, artist of empire", in Geoffrey Quilley and John Bonehill (eds), William Hodges 1744-1797: the Art of Exploration, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2004, p. 1-7.
  15. ^ https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/13413.html (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  16. ^ https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/13410.html (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  17. ^ See Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage de la frégate la Boudeuse et de la flûte l'Étoile autour du monde, [1771], Paris, Éditions La Découverte, 1992.
  18. ^ https://collections.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/13384.html (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  19. ^ Georg Adam Forster, A Voyage Round the World in His Britannic Majesty's Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, During the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5, London, 1777, vol 1, p. 110-11.
  20. ^ See Edmund Burke's definition of the sublime: "Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain,and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling", in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757, ed. A. Phillips, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 36.
  21. ^ John McAleer and Nigel Rigby (eds.), Captain Cook and the Pacific: Art, Exploration and Empire, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2017, p. 129-133.
  22. ^ Cook, p. 170-171.
  23. ^ https://wsimag.com/british-museum/artworks/60065 (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  24. ^ Quoted in Julie Adams et al. (eds.), Reimagining Captain Cook, Pacific Perspectives, London, The British Museum Press, 2019, p. 42.
  25. ^ https://thisisnofantasy.com/exhibition/john-fries-award/ (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  26. ^ Cook, p. 293.
  27. ^ Op. cit., p. 297.
  28. ^ Op.cit., p. 170.
  29. ^ https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/maori-trading-a-crayfish-with-joseph-... (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  30. ^ Quoted in Tina Baum, Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, 2017, p. 129.https://nga.gov.au/defyingempire/artists.cfm?artistirn=37727 (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  31. ^ https://www.artribune.com/dal-mondo/2019/05/mostra-captain-cook-british-... (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  32. ^ Quoted in Julie Adams et al., op. cit., p. 34.
  33. ^ https://www.artribune.com/dal-mondo/2019/05/mostra-captain-cook-british-... (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  34. ^ Cook, Op. cit., p. 123.
  35. ^ Calvert's work can be found at the following addresshttps://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/43724/ (last accessed 25 March 2020).Gordon Bennett, Possession Island, 1991. Oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 162 cm x 260 cm. Museum of Sydney on the site of first Government House, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Sydney. http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2007/important-aboriginal... (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  36. ^ Desmond Manderson, Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, 163.
  37. ^ Simon Barker, The Ship: Retracing Cook's Endeavour Voyage, London, BBC, 2002, p. 6.
  38. ^ Margaret Jolly, Serge Tcherkézoff and Darrell Tryon, Oceanic Encounters: Exchange, Desire, Violence, Canberra, ANU Press, 2009, p. 1.
  39. ^ A reproduction of the series can be found at the following address: https://gramho.com/media/1980864341905715844 (last accessed 25 March 2020).
  40. ^ https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-136006839/view (last accessed 25 March 2020).

Référence électronique

Vanessa ALAYRAC-FIELDING, « From William Hodges’s View of Matavai Bay (1776) to Simon Gende’s Captn Cook in Australia (2018): the aesthetic of Pacific exploration and encounter in the 18th century and beyond », Astrolabe - ISSN 2102-538X [En ligne], Captain Cook after 250 years: Re-exploring The Voyages of James Cook (Avril 2020), mis en ligne le 25/04/2020, URL : https://www.crlv.org/articles/from-william-hodgess-view-of-matavai-bay-1776-to-simon-gendes-captn-cook-in-australia-2018