The Ducie Collection
The National Library of Australia has recently received one of the most significant acquisitions in its 105 year history. The Ducie Collection, purchased from the Moreton family in England, is the largest and most important collection of First Fleet art to have come on the market in the last 50 years.
The 56 watercolours that make up the Ducie Collection are attributed to George Raper, a midshipman on the flag ship Sirius, and one of the most talented First Fleet artists. The paintings represent the birds and flowers of the Port Jackson area as Raper saw them between 1788 and 1790.
Species depicted include the Crimson Rosella, the now-endangered Swift Parrot, a Laughing Kookaburra and a fairy wren. Raper is clearly fascinated by the brightness of the birds’ plumage and the cheekiness of the parrots. To capture the sheen on the feathers of the Bronzewing Pigeon, he, alone of all the First Fleet artists, uses a glittering bronze paint. The flower paintings include a waratah, boronia, crowea and dendrobium. Many of the images provide the first visual records of species such as the Swamp Lily and Wedding Bush. The works also reflect the perspective of a European artist encountering Australian birds and plants for the first time.
George Raper was born in 1769 and entered the Royal Navy at the age of thirteen. He sailed with Commodore Arthur Phillip and Captain Hunter in the Sirius in 1787 and was promoted to Midshipman during the voyage. When he arrived with the First Fleet in Port Jackson on January 1788 he was just 18 years old. He spent three periods there: from January to October 1788, from May 1789 to March 1790, and again briefly from late February to March 1791.
It is probable that the paintings in the Ducie Collection date from the period June to November 1789, when the Sirius was isolated at Careening Cove, now Mosman Bay, for repairs. The floral species depicted are all spring-flowering—summer-flowering callistemon and autumn-flowering banksias are significantly absent. At least two of the paintings have been dated as no later than 1789 by comparing them with related watercolours by Raper in the British Natural History Museum.
Unlike voyages of exploration by mariners such as James Cook, the First Fleet carried no professional artists. For visual evidence of the first impressions of Europeans of Australian’s puzzling flora and fauna, we rely on the work of the First Fleet officers and convicts. George Raper is recognised as one of the most talented of the First Fleet artists.
The watercolours were discovered in a storage building near Tortworth Manor, in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire, during a routine valuation of the estate of the Earl of Ducie. The Library began negotiations to buy the paintings in January 2005, after being approached by the firm Dreweatt Neate as representatives of the Trustees of the estate. The Trustees had decided to seek an Australian institutional buyer rather than to sell the paintings by auction, saving the paintings from dispersal among many institutions and private collectors.
The Ducie Collection complements 16 watercolours, manuscripts and maps by George Raper, purchased in 1999 from one of Raper’s descendants. It also sheds new light on another of the Library’s most significant collection items—the sketchbook of birds and flowers of New South Wales painted by Governor Hunter.
It now appears that Hunter copied many of his drawings from works by Raper in the Ducie Collection. The location of these two important groups of paintings in the Library will allow scholars to compare them and to consider the practice of copying as a method of accommodating the challenging new landscape and communicating information to others at home. The practice of copying, among the naval officers and convicts who made up the body of First Fleet artists, is a well-known phenomenon and was not at the time considered in any way improper.
The Earls of Ducie have a long connection with Australia. The fourth Earl of Ducie, Berkeley Basil Moreton, was a well-known Queensland pastoralist and member of the Legislative Assembly before inheriting the title in 1922. A branch of the family remained in Australia, and the sixth Earl, Basil Howard Moreton, moved to England from his Hervey Bay cane farm to take up the title after his uncle’s death in 1952. David Moreton, the present Earl of Ducie was born in Queensland.
Works from the Ducie Collection can be seen as part of the exhibition National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries opening at the National Library of Australia in Canberra on 3 December 2005.
More information and images of the watercolours are available by following the links from <http://www.nla.gov.au/collect/newacq/ducie/index.html>.
Yvonne Kennedy
Director
Communication and Marketing
National Library of Australia



