"The Encounter 1802"
Art of the Flinders and Baudin VoyagesTen thousand miles away from their rich and powerful master, two great navigators mapped the last unknown coast exactly two centuries ago. It was our shoreline.
"Bonjour, et bienvenu a` carte-postal". Pardon my French, but that is the way it might have been if Nicholas Baudin had hurried up and beaten Matthew Flinders to naming our coastal features. What would "Terre Napoleon" have been like? We'll never know, but we do know that they both had excellent artists on board, and now for the first time ever, their works have been brought together by the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Amongst the dozens of exhibits in the special exhibition space is a small charcoal drawing of the French ships. The vessels were small, but the meeting of the French Captain Baudin and the English navigator Flinders was hugely significant, surprising and potentially dangerous (they thought their countries were still at war). They sighted each other late in the afternoon of April 8, 1802 a few miles out to sea from what we call Victor Harbor.
Charts from both voyages remind us that there was a great gap of unknown coast - and peoples, plants, animals and creatures of the sea. Two young men were enlisted by the French Commander to illustrate his charts, and in Flinders' ships complement were a nineteen-year old landscape painting and a brilliant Austrian-born natural history specialist. They all turned their artists' eyes to the exotic feast around them.
It was the French who set off first to the unknown edge of the continent still known as Terra Australis. Flinders gave Baudin nine months start. How, then, did The Englishman come to map most of the South Australian coast first? The answer lies, in part, here amongst the gathering of exquisite artworks. A portrait of a Tasmanian Aboriginal mother and baby, for instance, was one of several delicate and positive portraits and scenes by Nicolas-Matin Petik. Baudin's orders demanded that his scientists and illustrators undertake a study of these people for the new science of anthropology just founded in Paris. It all took time - months and months of it.
The French expedition was also asked to collect scientific specimens, and the other artist, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur turned his eye to the southern seas and their stunning biodiversity. Seastars, leather-jacket fish, compass jellies and more were preserved and the beautiful watercolours produced back in Paris are temporarily back in the antipodes.
Lesueur also completed detailed watercolours of kangaroos and emus. One image portrays the now extinct dwarf emu of Kangaroo Island. Captain Baudin assembled a growing menagerie of live animals to take home to Napoleon's France. He took seventy-two in all back to Paris and to the chateau of their great patron of the sciences. Malmaison was the home of the Empress Josephine. A number of kangaroos, emus and swans lived out their days in her garden.
Port Lincoln has just celebrated the 200th anniversary of Matthew Flinders' sojourn in Boston Bay, and his mapping the surrounding features that now resonate with names from his home country Lincolnshire (Cape Donington for where he was born and Partney Island for the village in which he wed are just two examples).
William Westall was a promising nineteen-year-old painter when he boarded "Investigator". An oil painting of Port Lincoln from high in its surrounding hills was one of nine commissioned by the Admiralty on his return to London. He combined a number of pencil sketches and used artistic licence to produce a view of Boston Bay. In the foreground is a bush shelter of the Nauo people - Flinders called them "Australians" in his journal. It was the first ever use of that description.
Westall was also on board to help his commander chart the unknown coast, and there are long colour sketches in the exhibition which portray features that we still easily recognise. One panorama, for example, shows Mt. Arden and Mt. Brown in the Flinders Rangers looking exactly as they do today from a lookout at the head of Spencer Gulf. He also sketched the headland where the crew had knocked thirty-one kangaroos on the head. The Captain named Kangaroo Island in gratitude for a supply of fresh meat.
In the other major Westall painting on show, he has again combined emus from one sketch, thrown in some kangaroos and borrowed seals from another to complete the image of a bay on Kangaroo Island's north coast.
The pencilled works came from the National Library in Canberra and the oils from Admiralty House in Whitehall, London. The four artist's work has been brought together from a dozen or more collections across three continents and the exhibition represents a unique opportunity to see how European eyes first perceived our shores.
The encounter of Le Geographe and the Investigators two centuries ago was a serendipitous meeting of two great navigators - and scientists and artists. Aboard were Petit's portraits of aborigines, Lesueur's loving depictions of the denizens of the deep, Westall's coastal scenes - and a growing body of work of the greatest natural history artist of all time…. The Leonardo of his field, Ferdinand Bauer. His seadragons, leather jackets, frogs and lizards are so vibrant that you'd think he was on something strange as he painted them. His secret is revealed in the exhibition. A detailed pencil sketch of a blue swimmer crab (the familiar "bluey" of our tidal flats) contains hundreds of small numerals. He painted by numbers!
The spectacular watercolour of the crustacean was completed nine years after the voyage in London. As Flinders was venturing into Pelican Lagoon on Kangaroo Island, Bauer was probably sketching a crimson rosella, with up to one thousand different shades indicated from his colour code. While the crew of Investigators mourned the drowning of eight men at Memory Cove near Port Lincoln, Bauer worked on. For his superb rendition of a yellow, collared Port Lincoln parrot, he called on two hundred separate hues of green done to make it come alive on paper.
Ferdinard Bauer was also a fundamentally important illustrator for Robert Brown, the equally great botanist aboard the English expedition. More than 1700 botanical drawings helped him revolutionise the geography of plants internationally and put thousands of Australian plants on the map and in order. Brown became an intellectual giant in botany. Immaculate science and intricate and beautiful art came together in Bauer's plant watercolours.
At last, despite leaky boats, dicey encounters and unbelievable misadventures two hundred years ago, the Art Gallery of South Australia has collected those amazing first impressions by Europeans of the unknown coast. Soon they'll be gone again, and so this is a very special two hundredth anniversary opportunity to appreciate them together as "The Encounter 1802 - Art of the Flinders and Baudin Voyages"
Art Gallery of South Australia
North Terrace, Adelaide
Ph. (08) 8207 7000
www.artgallery.sa.gov.au"The Encounter 1802"
Admission Prices
$10.00 Adults
$8.00 Concession / Students
FREE Children under 16 Years15 February - 21 April 2002
Open every day 10am - 5pm
See also: www.encounter2002.com
