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Catalogue Essay by Marian Jameson Curator | Senior Librarian, Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts
The Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts is fortunate to have in its collection many major illustrated works of natural history published in the nineteenth century. This exhibition features examples from four of these works to present a comparison between English and French techniques in the art of scientific illustration. The French navigator Jules-Sébastien-César Dumont d'Urville (1790-1842) led two expeditions around the world, in 1826-29 and 1837-40. The accounts of his discoveries and the accompanying ‘atlases’ of images, Voyage de la corvette l’Astrolabe and Voyage au Póle Sud et dans l'Océanie sur les corvettes l'Astrolabe et la Zélée, were published in 1830-1833 and 1841-55 respectively. These works are his lasting legacy to the history of exploration. Although it is the zoological atlases which are the primary focus of this exhibition, some of anthropological plates made from the first voyage which depict costumes and elaborate body decorations of the people of the Pacific region are also featured.
Dumont d'Urville, born in 1790 in Normandy, joined the navy in 1807. Early in his career he developed interests in linguistics and botany. While travelling in the Mediterranean in 1820 he was responsible for obtaining the statue of Venus de Milo for the Government of France, for which he received the Légion d'honneur. He made his first voyage around the world under Duperrey, in the Coquille, in 1822-25. Although history and science owe an acknowledgement to Dumont d’Urville for his courageous and intrepid voyages, in this exhibition we are celebrating the fine craftsmanship of the artists such as Louis de Sainson who accompanied him on those voyages and those in Paris who worked on the illustrations from specimens collected around the world. These artists also left a significant legacy. Pretre was the principal zoological artist for the first voyage; and for the second there were specialists - Werner and Borromée for mammals, Borromée for crustaceans, Blanchard for insects and Oudart for birds. The English naturalist John Gould (1804-1881) is best known today for his lithographs of animals and birds of the world – there are more than three thousand plates published in more than forty handsome volumes. By 1840 he already had an enviable reputation as an ornithologist and naturalist and was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1843. His major Australian works appeared a little later than those recording Dumont d’Urville’s expeditions - The birds of Australia in parts from 1840 to 1848 and The mammals of Australia from 1845 to 1863. He employed the best natural history artists of his time: his wife, Elizabeth, for the early plates of The birds of Australia; Edward Lear (briefly); Joseph Wolf; and Henry Constantine Richter, the artist of all of the Gould works in this exhibition. Gould’s artists put their subjects in context; finely executed drawings are surrounded by vegetation, and, in some cases, recognizable geographical features. Some critics maintain that his creatures are flat and lifeless (and this may be true for one or two of the birds exhibited here), but generally his creatures step out from the page into the real world.
Most of the works in this exhibition are superb examples of both the art of scientific illustration and the craft of lithography (that is, the images have been drawn onto grease-covered stones and then printed on paper from the stones). The images are hand-coloured, with particular attention given to plumage, skin and the treatment of the eyes, using glazes of albumen and other techniques to give life and energy to the scientific work. The fine detail and particular attention to facial features, in some cases, gives an air of the creatures as having human characteristics. We may even imagine that some of the creatures are holding conversations, or are looking at us directly. The comparative study of the races of mankind had been popular since colonisation began in the eighteenth century and Dumont d’Urville was an enthusiastic devotee. The anthropological plates by Louis de Sainson from the first voyage display the same level of detail in their depiction of the human race as the zoological artists gave to their animals. As you move through the exhibition, the emphasis changes from the intrepid voyages of the South Seas, closer to home and closer to our own time. The displays focus on Australian and then specifically Tasmanian fauna as subjects of the illustrators’ art. The broader Australian view is represented by artists in the tradition of Gould, such as Harriet Scott and Helena Forde (for the zoologist Gerard Krefft) whose works are displayed in the Allport Library. The naturalist, John Gray, whose contribution to Australian zoology is considered by many to be second only to John Gould, is also represented. The Tasmanian view is displayed in the Print Room, which features Gould’s lithographs of Tasmanian creatures; from the now-endangered devil to the common wombat and from the humble plover to the fairy penguin. Finally, in recent works by three contemporary Tasmanian photographers, the viewer engages directly with a moment of high emotional appeal. Through a combination of fine photographic artistry and deliberate natural history observation, these give a modern interpretation of the concept of art in the service of science. August 2007 |
