Artist: John Hall (1739-1797) after John Webber (1751-1793)
Title: A Woman of Eaoo
Date: 1784
School: British, XVIIIth-century
Medium: engraving
Dimensions: 290 x 224mm (plate), 550 x 425mm (sheet)
Watermark: countermark of Dovecote/Colombier, French 18th-century, Heawood 1237 (see image below)
Inscriptions/marks: in the plate lower left border <<J. Webber del.>>, in the plate lower centre border <<AWOMAN of EAOO>>>, in the plate lower right border <<J. Hall sculp.>>, in the plate upper right border <<23>>, on the image lower right plate mark border a blind stamp of a flower (see image below)
Condition: good condition of an impression on an uncut sheet with wide margins. Some staining not encroaching on the image. This impression is printed on heavy French paper with a Dovecote/Colombier watermark. The paper for the folio volume of plates accompanying the three-volume text of the official account of Cook’s third and last voyage was sourced from France from the Parisian bookseller Monsieur Panckoucke. On this see reference below.
Description: Portrait of a young woman of the chiefly class on the island of Eua in Tonga. Three-quarter view of head, shoulders and exposed breasts. Cook visited Eua in July 1777. Engraving based on a drawing by Webber now in the British Library, Add MS 15513 f.12. Published as plate 23 in the Atlas volume of James Cook & James King, Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, undertaken by the Command of His Majesty, for making discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere. Performed under the direction of Captains Cook, Clerke and Gore, in His Majesty’s ships the Resolution and Discovery , in the years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779 and 1780, In three volumes. and a fourth folio volume with engravings, known as “Atlas”, London, W. and A. Strahan for G Nicol … and T. Cadell, 1784.
Reference: on the publication of the plates see Rüdiger Joppien “Publication of the Voyage”, in Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, Volume Three Text The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776-1780, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1988, pp. 161-169. For an explanation of the events depicted see Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, Volume Three Catalogue The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776-1780, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1988, 3.64 and 3.64A.
Provenance: Peter Wedde Antiques, Wellington, 1998
