The botanical and general artist to Sir Joseph Banks, botanist to James Cook’s first voyage in the Pacific. He didn’t live to see any of his works shown to the public.
expedition
In two early expeditions to the Americas, he gathered great amounts of information about flora and fauna, and the ethnography of indigenous peoples.
He was one of the first Europeans to try settling in what’s now Georgia in the USA. His paintings weren’t rediscovered for over 200 years.
In four years, he travelled over 4,000 miles in largely unexplored parts of South Africa, and collected more than 50,000 specimens. And he painted.
In 1832, he just sailed off to India to spend the next 7 years wandering around the Western Himalaya. When someone pointed a gun at him, he quickly painted their portrait.
It was only the fourteenth ascent of Western Europe’s highest mountain. Their provisions included 20 bottles of red wine and 18 chickens. His painting helped make mountaineering respectable.
As a surveyor and civil engineer, he was more familiar with the inside of a tent than an office. Paintings of Malaya, Singapore and New Zealand.
He went to the Antarctic twice with Scott, where he sketched, painted landscapes in watercolour, and made fine illustrations of penguins.
He went on two expeditions: one to Spitzbergen in 1839, the second to Brazil in the late 1850s. But which of his paintings are real, and which imagined?
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