Project outline

The two paintings were the result of a commission to the artist from the gentleman-scientist Sir Joseph Banks, immediately following his part in Captain James Cook’s ‘first voyage of discovery’ to the Pacific (1768–71). Banks is one of the most significant figures in the development of natural history in Britain and the voyage itself is traditionally identified as the moment of European discovery of Australia (though its western coast was previously known). It changed the course of maritime science and the perceptions of Britain’s place in the world.

Stubbs’s paintings brought to public attention two of the animals that were to be most closely identified with the extraordinary new world of Australia. They are an eloquent testimony to the role of art, with its imaginative and sensual aspects, in public understanding of scientific exploration and the natural world at the dawn of the modern era. They are iconic not only of the New World, but the values and methods of the Enlightenment as a whole.

Questions

Through the painting tour and accompanying programme of activities Travellers’ Tails aims consider key questions around the history of exploration, art and science, including:

• How have new places and knowledge historically been made familiar through using systems society understands and how has this continued today?
• What is the alternative history of exploration to that of a series of heroes?
• Why has the perception and practice of art and science separated into two distinct disciplines and what is the future of this division?
• How do Enlightenment models of natural history still affect our understanding of it today?
• What are today’s frontiers and what is left to explore?
• How is Empire represented in museums and what is missing?
• What does it mean to be ‘out of place’?
• Stubbs’s paintings of foreign animals were known as ‘exotics’- what does exotic mean to today?
• What do we still have in Britain today that resulted from 18th-century voyages?
• Does exploration have to lead to exploitation?