Abstract Summary
In 1773, visitors crowded one of London’s preeminent exhibition venues in order to see two recent paintings by George Stubbs. Portraying a dingo and a kangaroo, these images were among the first to depict recently-discovered Pacific flora and fauna for a European audience. Yet Stubbs – whose paintings of animals were valued for their anatomical precision rooted in direct observation – had never actually seen these creatures. The evidentiary authority of the images rested, instead, on their relation to the work of a rarely discussed but crucially important figure: the Scottish natural history illustrator Sydney Parkinson, who had died while serving as an artist on Captain Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific. This paper examines the tension between observation and invention in the visual culture of scientific discovery from Cook’s first expedition. The paintings and prints that circulated in Britain following Cook’s return deployed a number of competing – and at times even contradictory – pictorial strategies to shore up their scientific credibility and to enhance their popular appeal. Situated between specimen and spectacle, this paper will show, these images created a framework for visualising Pacific exploration that shaped not only how British audiences imagined the remote region but also how scientific knowledge about it was disseminated to a wider public.
