.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
This cosmically lit (by meteor- and moonlight) nocturne on the Zambezi just above the Falls is one Thomas Baines's most remarkable African pictures. It is one of the first of Baines's great suite of paintings of the Victoria Falls and the Zambezi delta painted from his sketches made at the Falls in July-August 1862. Baines had embarked on the Chapman expedition with a view to producing a great series of paintings of the Falls, seen by just half a dozen Europeans before him, and never before depicted and displayed to the Victorian world. When he returned to the Cape these Falls and Zambezi views were the stars of his illustrated lectures, and these would be the key attraction of his hastily published narrative Explorations in South-West Africa (1864) and his portfolio of views, Victoria Falls (1865). It would be these subjects too that drew attention when Baines's work was exhibited at the Crystal Palace in London in 1869.
Baines and Chapman hunted hippopotami half a mile above the falls with the old boatman, 'Zanjueelah', on 13 August 1862, and ended the day entering 'into a kind of conditional arrangement to be taken tomorrow to an island where the hippopotami are likely to come ashore at night.' (T. Baines, Explorations in South-West Africa, London, 1864, p.521) -- such an excursion the subject of this night scene, with Baines or Chapman following Zanjueelah carrying his 'formidable spear'. The nocturnal subject (which sees Baines attending to both botany and astronomy) is lit by the incandescent meteor and the moon, probably the astronomical phenomena seen by Baines earlier in the year, as they so closely follow Baines's description of the meteor seen plunging towards the horizon on 13 January 1862. The picture may then be a conflation of two events in January and August 1862.
‘As an astronomer, whose observations could be depended upon, the estimable Sir Thomas Maclear, of the Cape Observatory, considered him second only to Livingstone. ‘ (from Henry Hall’s ‘Memoir of the late Thomas Baines Esq., F.R.G.S.’ published in T. Baines, The Gold Regions …, London and Port Elizabeth, 1877, p.xvi).
Baines describes seeing meteors twice in his Explorations in South-West Africa, on 20 November 1861 en route to the Victoria Falls: ‘At night I observed Achernar, but having been occupied with other work, had not guessed the time sufficiently near to catch the star before passing the meridian. While thus engaged I saw a meteor shoot from the low mist on the southern horizon, and, slightly arching in its flight, rise towards the zenith, its head glowing with an intense liquid heat, as if of molten iron, in two or three successive drops, and leaving a train of sparks behind it, gradually fading from a white heat to yellow and dull red. It seemed as bright as a signal-rocket discharged at half a mile distance, and certainly much brighter than the planet that had just set.' (T. Baines, op. cit., p.233)
and later on 13 January 1862: ‘I was working beside a good ordinary lamp, and turning to the west I saw, notwithstanding the brightness of the moon, a meteor of unusual size and brilliancy slowly descending like a globe of glowing metal towards the horizon. All the ordinary ideas of shooting-stars, rockets, ., would be in fault in describing this. It seemed to me to be a body of considerable size, the slow apparent motion of which was due to its immense distance from the eye, and to its superior light spreading an additional glow over a large portion of the space already illuminated by the moon.’ (ibid., p.317)
There are three works on paper by Baines depicting meteors or fireballs and comets: the watercolour of a ‘Meteor at Mahalaapie’ near Lake Ngami (which clearly illustrates the meteor seen on 20 November 1861), from the Quentin Keynes Collection, sold Christie’s 7 April 2004, lot 447 (illustrated above), the undated watercolour in the collection of the Royal Geographical Society ‘Meteor and Comet – Damara carrying fire horn’ (RGSX229/0221948), and the watercolour in the William Fehr Collection, ‘Young palm on an island in the Zambezi above the Falls – and Meteor’. The latter, dated March 1865, seems to show the same young palm and meteor as the present picture. The William Fehr drawing would then, unusually, postdate the subject first 'sketched August 1862' (as Baines records on the reverse of the present picture).
For a discussion of Baines’s interest in and study of astronomy, his skilled use of stellar observations to determine position, and his meteor pictures, including the present picture, see J. Stone, ‘The cartography of Thomas Baines’ and B. Warner, 'Thomas Baines and Astronomy' in the exhibition catalogue Thomas Baines: An Artist in the Service of Science in Southern Africa, (Christie’s) London, 1999, pp.118-35.
For a survey of Baines's botanical work (the palms here as important a component as the human and cosmic action, as iterated in the title here, and in the plate in Baines's The Gold Regions ...), see M. Arnold, 'Thomas Baines and southern African flora ...' in the same catalogue, pp.70-89. The artist sent botanical drawings and specimens via his friend Frederick Logier in Cape Town to the Hookers at Kew and had already impressed the botanist John Kirk on Livingstone's Zambezi expedition: 'Mr Baines has given actual views, and has so scrupulously adhered to nature, that anyone familiar with the vegetation may name the very plants represented in his paintings. In the distant views of palm-clad islands a botanist may recognise the feature which at once distinguishes the variety of Hyphaene palm-tree, growing here, from all other existing between the central district and the east coast.' (Kirk quoted in M. Arnold, op. cit., p.71)
Baines and Chapman hunted hippopotami half a mile above the falls with the old boatman, 'Zanjueelah', on 13 August 1862, and ended the day entering 'into a kind of conditional arrangement to be taken tomorrow to an island where the hippopotami are likely to come ashore at night.' (T. Baines, Explorations in South-West Africa, London, 1864, p.521) -- such an excursion the subject of this night scene, with Baines or Chapman following Zanjueelah carrying his 'formidable spear'. The nocturnal subject (which sees Baines attending to both botany and astronomy) is lit by the incandescent meteor and the moon, probably the astronomical phenomena seen by Baines earlier in the year, as they so closely follow Baines's description of the meteor seen plunging towards the horizon on 13 January 1862. The picture may then be a conflation of two events in January and August 1862.
‘As an astronomer, whose observations could be depended upon, the estimable Sir Thomas Maclear, of the Cape Observatory, considered him second only to Livingstone. ‘ (from Henry Hall’s ‘Memoir of the late Thomas Baines Esq., F.R.G.S.’ published in T. Baines, The Gold Regions …, London and Port Elizabeth, 1877, p.xvi).
Baines describes seeing meteors twice in his Explorations in South-West Africa, on 20 November 1861 en route to the Victoria Falls: ‘At night I observed Achernar, but having been occupied with other work, had not guessed the time sufficiently near to catch the star before passing the meridian. While thus engaged I saw a meteor shoot from the low mist on the southern horizon, and, slightly arching in its flight, rise towards the zenith, its head glowing with an intense liquid heat, as if of molten iron, in two or three successive drops, and leaving a train of sparks behind it, gradually fading from a white heat to yellow and dull red. It seemed as bright as a signal-rocket discharged at half a mile distance, and certainly much brighter than the planet that had just set.' (T. Baines, op. cit., p.233)
and later on 13 January 1862: ‘I was working beside a good ordinary lamp, and turning to the west I saw, notwithstanding the brightness of the moon, a meteor of unusual size and brilliancy slowly descending like a globe of glowing metal towards the horizon. All the ordinary ideas of shooting-stars, rockets, ., would be in fault in describing this. It seemed to me to be a body of considerable size, the slow apparent motion of which was due to its immense distance from the eye, and to its superior light spreading an additional glow over a large portion of the space already illuminated by the moon.’ (ibid., p.317)
There are three works on paper by Baines depicting meteors or fireballs and comets: the watercolour of a ‘Meteor at Mahalaapie’ near Lake Ngami (which clearly illustrates the meteor seen on 20 November 1861), from the Quentin Keynes Collection, sold Christie’s 7 April 2004, lot 447 (illustrated above), the undated watercolour in the collection of the Royal Geographical Society ‘Meteor and Comet – Damara carrying fire horn’ (RGSX229/0221948), and the watercolour in the William Fehr Collection, ‘Young palm on an island in the Zambezi above the Falls – and Meteor’. The latter, dated March 1865, seems to show the same young palm and meteor as the present picture. The William Fehr drawing would then, unusually, postdate the subject first 'sketched August 1862' (as Baines records on the reverse of the present picture).
For a discussion of Baines’s interest in and study of astronomy, his skilled use of stellar observations to determine position, and his meteor pictures, including the present picture, see J. Stone, ‘The cartography of Thomas Baines’ and B. Warner, 'Thomas Baines and Astronomy' in the exhibition catalogue Thomas Baines: An Artist in the Service of Science in Southern Africa, (Christie’s) London, 1999, pp.118-35.
For a survey of Baines's botanical work (the palms here as important a component as the human and cosmic action, as iterated in the title here, and in the plate in Baines's The Gold Regions ...), see M. Arnold, 'Thomas Baines and southern African flora ...' in the same catalogue, pp.70-89. The artist sent botanical drawings and specimens via his friend Frederick Logier in Cape Town to the Hookers at Kew and had already impressed the botanist John Kirk on Livingstone's Zambezi expedition: 'Mr Baines has given actual views, and has so scrupulously adhered to nature, that anyone familiar with the vegetation may name the very plants represented in his paintings. In the distant views of palm-clad islands a botanist may recognise the feature which at once distinguishes the variety of Hyphaene palm-tree, growing here, from all other existing between the central district and the east coast.' (Kirk quoted in M. Arnold, op. cit., p.71)