John Hamilton Mortimer and the discovery of Captain Cook
John Hamilton Mortimer (1740-1779),
Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Sandwich, Dr Daniel Solander and Dr John Hawkesworth, c. 1771, oil on canvas, nla.pic-an7351768
The National Library of Australia holds within its large collection of artworks a most intriguing eighteenth century painting, the bequest of Dame Merlyn Myer. A beautiful work in good condition, the painting is unsigned and lacks its original title. Early research into the painting revealed that it had hung unremarked in private collections for 150 years and then suffered a misattribution to Johann Zoffany which, while initially inflating its value in the art market, had obscured the painting’s true identity and significance. Rejection of the Zoffany attribution also cast doubt on the subjects Joseph Banks and Captain Cook and the date 1771
The Grand Tour and the Global Landscape Tim Barringer
Fig. 1.
Rome from the Villa Madama by Richard Wilson (1714–1782), 1753. Oil on canvas, 37 5/8 by 52 ¼ inches.
Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
During the eighteenth century, wealthy and privileged Britons, such as the group portrayed by Nathaniel Dance c. 1760 (Fig. 2), hastened south, to drink at the font of European civilization in Rome amid the ruins of an earlier empire, and to absorb the classics in literature and art. Habits of viewing the landscape that derived ultimately from the Grand Tour determined the ways British artists and travelers framed their visual experience of the rest of the world. The Grand Tour thus lies in the ancestry of what I will call “global landscape,” the art of the British Empire. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British artists traveled south first to Italy, and then to the Pacific, and then across the globe. Wherever they went, they envisaged the wor