audiences (Quilley, 2011, 42–44). European artists informed their domestic audiences of new additions to
Britain’s geographical discoveries, trading posts and empire, by providing topographical, “onthe
spot” studies inspired by antiquarian and ethnographic interests that suggested respect for the attributes
and actual appearances of newly discovered lands while catering for the aesthetic standards of the
European collector or “man of taste.”
Hybrid representations of this kind made the unfamiliar more familiar, and newly discovered lands
became more readily visualized and emotionally engaging as part of a global national identity developing
in the British public (Smith, 1985, ix; Crowley, 2011, 1–11; Quilley, 2011, 32). By such means, colonial
landscape art may help to legitimize imperial power. According to one commentator it “naturalizes a
cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable”
(W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, 1994, cited in Crowley, 2011, 1). The picturesque, rooted in the
arcadian classicism of Claude Lorrain, and so familiar from its presence in English landscape design,
also functioned as a visual language of loss for the British gentry. It evoked the loss of their aesthetic
elitism due to the rise of the middle classes in the new “public” for art and, if they actually traveled
abroad, the loss or absence of their home (McLean, 2007, 26).
Tahiti lent itself to a western landscape aesthetic in a way that other colonial territories failed to do.
Australia was first settled by the British in 1788 as a penal colony. For some years, colonial artists there,
mainly army and navy officers and convicts, focused on the relatively “safe” motifs of settlement
buildings and “exotic” (aboriginal) cultural, animal or botanical details rather than on the slightly
intimidating local landscape views, less easily circumscribed within a picturesque format (Radford,
2013, 92). Vast wildernesses were more problematic, their “sublime” dimensions often perceived as
threatening (Crowley, 2011, 216). Even at Sydney Cove, however, artists used a picturesque idiom in
order to establish a colonial identity (McLean, 2007, 23, 37).
Art produced by native Pacific peoples – cloaks, baskets, canoe paddles, carved wooden bands, non
representational figures, tattoos and totems – were given to visiting European explorers as part of a
process of bargaining and exchange but, like many Chinese artifacts or “curiosities,” these were poorly
understood at the time by western publics and were often regarded as ethnographic evidence rather than
as a source of aesthetic experience. However, as the Romantic movement developed, such artifacts came
to be appreciated for the appeals to feeling and imagination of their “primitivism,” a quality increasingly
acknowledged to have existed even in preclassical Greek art, the fount of European civilization (Smith,
1985, 123–130; Wood, 2012, 285–295).
The tendency to judge degrees of “progress” or “civilization” by European standards was well
established (Quilley, 2011, 53–78). Harriet Guest has deconstructed Hodges’ images of South Seas
peoples as part of an attempt by Europeans to theorize cultural differences in a way that brought as much
attention to their own values as to those of the peoples they observed (Guest, 2007, 5–6, 11–17, 22–24,
169–198). Reynolds’ 1775–1776 portrait of Omai (c.1751–1780) or Mai, as he should have been known
(Figure 3.11), represents an inhabitant of an island near Tahiti, employed as an interpreter, who was
brought back to Britain by Cook. The portrait serves as an example of the “civilizing” tendency in
European representations of native peoples. Like Verlest’s work it demonstrates a fusion of “exotic”
difference with an impulse to defuse or domesticate it. Omai is represented as a noble savage in loose,
dignified, Orientalized dress and with a pose reminiscent of that of a classical god. He conforms to
contemporary western conventions of masculine aristocratic gentility. However, both the stereotypical
exotic setting and the presence on his hand of a tattoo undermine any suggestion of western patrician
status. Reynolds, who was quite broadminded with regard to cultural and aesthetic relativity, saw
tattooing as a step too far as it literally cut into the skin in barbarous fashion, as well as evoking suspect