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Lot Essay
Webber was employed under Captain James Cook on his third expedition aboard the Resolution (1776-1780) on orders from the British Admiralty. The journey was to take four years, encompassing Australasia, the South Pacific, Hawaii, the west coast of North America, including Alaska and the Bering Strait, before returning via East Asia.
Webber was engaged ‘for the express purpose of supplying the unavoidable imperfections of written accounts, by enabling us to preserve, and to bring home, such drawings of the most memorable scenes of our transactions, as could only be expected by a professed and skilled artist.’ He produced more than 200 studies which recorded the full breadth of the expedition; a body of work which was the largest body of travel imagery known before the invention of photography. Many of his studies were later worked up as oil paintings, shown at the Royal Academy for the rest of his life. The studies themselves range from geological scenes of harbours and landscapes, natural history studies of flora and fauna, interactions between Cook’s party and the native inhabitants of the places they visited, as well as drawings of the physiognomy, clothing, weaponry, housing and daily activities of the people they came across.
The Resolution reached Prince William Sound, Alaska on 12 May 1778, staying until 20 May. On their arrival, two large canoes with about twenty people in each appeared and made signs of a peaceful reception. Webber made several drawings of the local canoes, both of the large, open style, and the smaller, covered iteration seen in the present drawing.
This drawing was combined with another study of a single seater canoe, of a style used in Oonalashka, in a sheet identified by R. Joppien and B. Smith, The Art of Captain Cook's Voyages, New Haven and London, 1988, III, p. 478, no. 3.249. That sheet, now in the Dixson Library, State Gallery of New South Wales, bears the later inscription 'Canoes of Oonalashka', which has led this subject of the present sheet to be wrongly identified as an Oonalashkan canoe. The Sydney sheet, probably prepared for the engraver, became plate 50 of Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific, engraved in 1784.
Webber was engaged ‘for the express purpose of supplying the unavoidable imperfections of written accounts, by enabling us to preserve, and to bring home, such drawings of the most memorable scenes of our transactions, as could only be expected by a professed and skilled artist.’ He produced more than 200 studies which recorded the full breadth of the expedition; a body of work which was the largest body of travel imagery known before the invention of photography. Many of his studies were later worked up as oil paintings, shown at the Royal Academy for the rest of his life. The studies themselves range from geological scenes of harbours and landscapes, natural history studies of flora and fauna, interactions between Cook’s party and the native inhabitants of the places they visited, as well as drawings of the physiognomy, clothing, weaponry, housing and daily activities of the people they came across.
The Resolution reached Prince William Sound, Alaska on 12 May 1778, staying until 20 May. On their arrival, two large canoes with about twenty people in each appeared and made signs of a peaceful reception. Webber made several drawings of the local canoes, both of the large, open style, and the smaller, covered iteration seen in the present drawing.
This drawing was combined with another study of a single seater canoe, of a style used in Oonalashka, in a sheet identified by R. Joppien and B. Smith, The Art of Captain Cook's Voyages, New Haven and London, 1988, III, p. 478, no. 3.249. That sheet, now in the Dixson Library, State Gallery of New South Wales, bears the later inscription 'Canoes of Oonalashka', which has led this subject of the present sheet to be wrongly identified as an Oonalashkan canoe. The Sydney sheet, probably prepared for the engraver, became plate 50 of Cook’s Voyage to the Pacific, engraved in 1784.