Figure 3.10 Johannes or Jan Verelst: No Nee Yeath Tan no Ton, King of the Generath, oil on canvas,
1710.
Source: Private collection/Bridgeman Images.Landscape representations of the United States and Canada were often dominated by fantasy or fiction.
Scholars now read the visual foci and compositional formats of colonial landscapes as indicators of the
state of imperial politics. Prior to the Seven Years War, many colonial landscapes were a product of
artists’ imaginations. Once “ownership” of territories had been agreed, a proliferation of new maps,
topographical paintings and prints encouraged the peoples of “conquering” nations to feel reassured about
and take pride in the imperial project (Crowley, 2011, 47–73). Coastal views were produced as
navigational aids to those likely to follow in the tracks of early explorers and sometimes adopted the
format of the sea chart, which used both plan and elevation views to place emphasis on the mercantile
culture, trade and commerce that dominated many of Britain’s eighteenthcentury colonial relations
(Crowley, 2011, 47–73; Muller, 2012, 48–55). Some eighteenthcentury topographical prints of the
United States and Canada have been discussed with regard to their application of picturesque
composition, a sign of European gentility, to fashionable, local, “exotic” flora and fauna. It was some time
before Americanborn artists developed, postindependence, languages of visual representation
expressing the tastes of their own critically active “publics” (Crowley, 2011, 142–165).
Britain did not make any territorial claims in the South Sea (Pacific) islands for some time, as Spain had a
monopoly there, but it did claim and settle what we now know as Australia and New Zealand. Tahiti was
colonized by the end of the eighteenth century, by British missionaries. New dimensions to European
fantasies of the “exotic” appeared as a result of voyages of discovery by Samuel Wallis (1728–1795) and
other explorers, including James Cook (1728–1779), whose voyages in the years between 1768 and 1780
to Tahiti, Australia and New Zealand were recorded pictorially by the artists Sydney Parkinson (c.1745–
1771), William Hodges and John Webber (1751–1793) (Smith, 1985, 8–132; Wood, 2012, 264–269).
Cook’s Voyages of the South Seas (1768–1771) sold well and included a separate volume of 61
illustrations. Joseph Banks, whose interests covered both art and science, joined Cook’s first voyage and
played a major role in coordinating the visual records made. A member of the Royal Society, the Society
of Arts and the Society of Antiquaries, he saw the need to satisfy the need both for scientifically accurate,
closely observed landscapes, naturalist studies and coastal profiles, and for providing “pleasing” pictures
for audiences at home (Smith, 1985, 13–14). Bernard Smith has described the new colonial genre of the
“typical” landscape, “a form of landscape the components of which were carefully selected in order to
express the essential qualities of a particular kind of geographical environment” (Smith, 1985, 4). Such
landscapes aimed to create a new type of visual unity derived from scientific observation by explorers of
different environmental and climactic locations.
As with European images of encounters with American Indian settlements, however, extensive use of
classical motifs, for example, antique statuary poses, or indirect references to a Golden Age in ancient
Greece, mediated many “documentary” records of newly discovered South Seas peoples (Smith, 1985,
40–43). Smith has discussed in detail the efforts made by artists such as Hodges, on voyages of
exploration to the Pacific, to balance the requirements of documentary or topographical accuracy with
established European landscape traditions including the neoclassical, the arcadian, the picturesque and
the sublime. Hodges went beyond an “eyewitness” approach necessary to lend authenticity to his
compositions to develop his own style, in line with ideas on the “genius” or “free spirit” that were
gaining currency in British art (see Chapter 1; also Smith, 1985, 1–7, 54–80; Quilley and Bonehill, 2004;
McLean, 2007, 26; Quilley, 2011, 16–78; Wood, 2012, 270–284). After his voyages to the Pacific and
other parts of the globe, Hodges produced large canvas works likely to appeal to Royal Academy