Early French Views of the Antipodes: Two Recent Additions to the Alexander Turnbull Library's Drawings and Prints Collection

Abstract

Outside France, the tally of original works of art relating to early French voyages of exploration to this part of the world is very small. In 1990, a National Library exhibition New Zealand seen by the French, was curated by Roger Collins of the University of Otago. It showed a wide selection of the French views of New Zealand up to the mid-1840s, using paintings, drawings and prints available from French and New Zealand collections.

The Alexander Turnbull Library was able to make several contributions to that exhibition with a range of secondary copies in the shape of aquatints, lithographs and engravings from the voyages of Duperrey in 1824, Dumont d'Urville in 1827, LaPlace in 1831, du Petit-Thouars in 1838 and Dumont d'Urville again in 1840, along with etchings by Charles Meryon of his experiences in New Zealand between 1843 and 1846. However, the exhibition brought home to the Library the unfortunate fact that the only original works of art that we could contribute were Charles Meryon's well-known large drawing of the assassination of Marion du Fresne, an imaginative reconstruction of a dramatic event that had occurred some 70 years earlier; and a few watercolours associated with Duperrey's 1824 visit to the Bay of Islands. This latter group of watercolours are not eye-witness records of New Zealand in 1824 but are all re-drawings by a Paris artist, Antoine Chazal, of the somewhat inadequate artistic attempts of the official artist aboard the Coquille, Louis LeJeune. An example of this latter group is a view of Rangihoua Pa in the Bay of Islands with a Maori canoe in the foreground, shown above.