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World War Ii

Painters & Paintings

While Joseph Banks used classical similes to describe Tahiti in his journal, none of the draughtsmen in his service—Buchan, Parkinson and Spöring—were trained to draw figures in the ‘correct' proportions of classical sculpture. As a result, their drawings of the people and scenes Banks describes are at odds with the journal.

When John Hawkesworth engaged artists to design and engrave the illustrations for his account of Cook's voyage, he chose Giovanni Battista Cipriani and Francesco Bartolozzi. Cipriani and his friend Bartolozzi, both originally from Florence, came to England in 1755 and became founding members of the Royal Academy when it was established in 1768. Inheritors of a long-standing academic tradition that made few concessions to the need for scientifically accurate records of expeditions, Cipriani's Rococo Classicism was used to ‘improve' the drawings of Parkinson et al in much the same way that Hawkesworth ‘improved' Cook's journal.




Francesco Bartolozzi (1727–1815)
after Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727–1785)
after Sydney Parkinson (1745?–1771)
[A View of the Inside of a House in the Island of Ulietea, with the Representation of a Dance to the Music of the Country]
London: 1773
engraving; plate mark 21.2 x 30.1 cm
Pictorial Collection S1691

Drawing strongly on the conventions of Istoria or history painting, Mortimer celebrates the achievements of Cook's first Pacific voyage. Cook, at the centre of the composition, gestures towards the new discoveries he has made across the seas. On the left of the painting sits Joseph Banks, with Daniel Solander standing behind him. The figure at the right of the composition is John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the Admiralty, under whose orders Cook had sailed.

Banks sits upon a grassy bank, a reference to both his name and his passion for botany and natural history. The Earl leans upon a symbol of the classical past—regarded as the origin and...