Acquisition of a Lifetime: The Ducie Collection—Newly Purchased Paintings from the First Fleet
Linda Groom reveals a major purchase coup recently made by the Library’s Pictures Collection The National Library of Australia has just purchased 56 rare and exquisite First Fleet watercolours from their British owners. This is the largest and most significant collection of First Fleet art to have come on the market since 1953, when the collector Rex Nan Kivell purchased at a London auction a sketchbook by Captain John Hunter, later Governor of New South Wales. Drawn with loving care, in many cases the paintings are the first visual record of certain Australian plant and animal species by the hand of a European artist. Attributed to George Raper, a midshipman on the Sirius, they show the birds and flowers of the Port Jackson area as he would have seen them between 1788 and 1790. The paintings came to the attention of the firm Dreweatt Neate in 2004, during a routine valuation of the estate of Basil Moreton, sixth Earl of Ducie. The works had been passed down through generations of the Moreton family. They had been stored in an outbuilding on the Tortworth Estate, at the edge of the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. Unsigned and undated, their significance had remained unrecognised. The consequent lack of handling and display has left their colours in an astonishingly vibrant state. The National Library began negotiations to buy the paintings in January this year, after an approach from representatives of David Moreton, seventh Earl of Ducie, and the Moreton family. The family had elected to seek an Australian institutional buyer rather than to sell the paintings by auction, a course of action which would have almost certainly seen the paintings dispersed among institutions and private collectors. The Earls of Ducie have had a long connection with There are a number of possible links between the probable artist, George Raper, and the ancestors of the Earl of Ducie—through family connections, and the world of banking. Sir Joseph Banks, whose passion for the botany and zoology of The best-documented connection, however, is through Captain James Campbell, an officer of the Marines in the First Fleet. Two letters survive in the Mitchell Library (State Library of New South Wales), written by Captain Campbell from Port Jackson in 1788 to the 3rd Baron Ducie, in one of which (Ac 145; dated 12 July 1788) Campbell writes:
It is not known what became of the two pictures by Hunter to which Campbell refers, but the letter provides evidence that Baron Ducie received First Fleet pictures from an officer who knew Hunter, captain of Raper’s ship, the Sirius. Other parts of the letters report in detail to Baron Ducie on the flora and fauna of the new colony, and mention that Captain Campbell enclosed a kangaroo skin with the first letter and seeds with the second. This clearly establishes a strong First Fleet connection to a Ducie ancestor with an interest in Australian natural history. George Raper was born in 1769 and entered the Royal Navy at the age of 13. He sailed with Commodore Arthur Phillip and Captain Hunter in the Sirius, flagship of the First Fleet, in 1787, and was promoted to midshipman during the voyage. When Raper arrived in Port Jackson in January 1788 he was just 18. He spent three periods at Port Jackson: from January to October 1788, from May 1789 to March 1790, and briefly from late February to March 1791. It is likely 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 in this collection are all spring-flowering; summer-flowering Callistemons and autumn-flowering Banksias are significantly absent. Comparison with related paintings in the Natural History Museum has also produced evidence that at least one of the Ducie paintings was created no later than 1789. 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 perhaps the most talented of these. The paintings in the Ducie collection reflect the awe and wonder of the sailors of the First Fleet as they encountered Australian birds and plants for the first time. The species depicted include the crimson rosella, the now-endangered swift parrot, a kookaburra and a fairy wren. The artist 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 bronze-wing pigeon, Raper, alone of all the First Fleet artists, uses a glittering bronze paint. The flower paintings include a waratah, fringed lily, swamp lily, Boronia, Crowea and Dendrobium. The waratah has the confronting shape of a plant from another world.
To establish the authenticity of the paintings and their attribution to Raper, National Library conservators and curatorial staff examined them at first hand in April. An analysis of the watermarks in the paper confirmed a probable date in the First Fleet period. The paintings were also compared with watercolours by Raper held by the National Library of New Zealand and the Natural History Museum in London, some of which bear Raper’s signature. In two of the signed watercolours—at the National Library of New Zealand and the Natural History Museum—the tell-tale metallic paint appears. There are also a number of similarities in style among the Raper paintings held at the National Library of New Zealand, the Natural History Museum, and the Ducie collection. These likenesses include the addition of flowers or parts of plants to the bird watercolours, often in a composition that places a flower vertically beside the bird, in a disembodied perspective. The unbroken provenance of the paintings through the generations of the Moreton family, and the fact that they were discovered with other documents dating from the 1770s, further confirms their authenticity. The Ducie collection complements a collection of 16 Raper watercolours, manuscripts and maps, which was purchased by the National Library of Australia in 1999 from a descendant of the artist. It also provides new light on one of the Library’s great treasures, a sketchbook of birds and flowers of New South Wales made by Captain (later Governor) John Hunter. It is now apparent that Hunter copied many of his drawings from works in the Ducie collection. The practice of copying, among the naval officers and convicts who made up the body of First Fleet artists, is a wellknown phenomenon and was not at the time considered in any way improper. The location of these two important groups of paintings in the National Library will allow scholars to compare them and to make further conclusions about the social relationships among First Fleet officers, and about copying as a method of dealing with a challenging new landscape. Australians will have an opportunity to see selected paintings from the Ducie collection in the exhibition, Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries, which opens at the National Library in Canberra on 3 December 2005 before touring to all Australian state and territory capital cities. Digital copies are also viewable online, through the Library’s Pictures Catalogue at www.nla.gov.au/ catalogue/pictures, and via the Ducie website at www.nla.gov.au/collect/newacq/ducie/index.html LINDA GROOM is head of the National Library’s Pictures Collection |
| Back to NLA News Index | Back to December Issue | Back to NLA Home Page |
To order a particular issue of
the NLA News e-mail nlasales@nla.gov.au
or join the Friends of the National
Library of Australia and receive a copy each month by mail.