Quilley, Geoffrey (2014) 'By cruel foes oppress'd': British naval draughtsmen in Tahiti and the South Pacific in the 1840s. Journal of Historical Geography, 43. pp. 71-84. ISSN 0305-7488

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

This paper considers little-known imagery made by mid-nineteenth century naval officers travelling in the Pacific, which has often been overlooked by art historians. In particular, it examines landscape drawings and prints made by officers travelling on a sequence of voyages through Polynesia, and argues that these need to be understood within the specific context of Anglo-French imperial rivalry in the region focused on the French annexation of Tahiti in the early 1840s. Rather than being simply a transparent set of tourist souvenirs, the views produced by the British officers were self-consciously reiterative, both of each other and also of a genre of exploration imagery deriving from James Cook's seminal Pacific voyages of 1768–1780. As such, they perpetuate and naturalize an image of the islands as tied to a positivist and teleological account of British imperial history, in which the French presence on Tahiti is presented as invasive, aberrant and despotic. Taking these drawings and prints as a case study, it concludes that the mass of similar imagery lying ignored in local and national archives needs to be reviewed as meriting serious art-historical scrutiny.

Item Type:	Article
Schools and Departments:	School of History, Art History and Philosophy > Art History
Depositing User:	Geoffrey Quilley
Date Deposited:	03 May 2013 13:21
Last Modified:	07 Nov 2014 10:23
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/17415

📧 Request an update