Artist: John Hall (1739-1797) and Samuel Middiman (1751-1831) after John Webber (1751-1793)
Title: An Offering before Capt Cook in the Sandwich Islands
Date: 1784
School: British, XVIIIth-century
Medium: etching and engraving
Dimensions: 262 x 410mm (plate), 390 x 545mm (sheet)
Watermark: Dovecote/Colombier, French XVIIIth-century (see image below)
Inscriptions/marks: in the plate lower left border <<Drawn by J. Webber.>>,in the plate lower centre border <<The Landscape Engd by Middiman./An OFFERING before CAP.T COOK, in the SANDWICH ISLANDS.>> in the plate lower right border <<The Figures by Hall.>>, in the plate upper right <<60>>
Condition: fair condition of an impression on an uncut sheet with wide margins, small hole in the centre of the thatching of the structure, some foxing and fading beyond the old mount. 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: Cook surrounded by his officers receives the offering of a pig by a man surrounded by his tribesmen seated on the ground in front of a thatched structure with a a fence and draped God figures. On the left is a kneeling figure playing a gourd pipe. Records one of the two occasions in January 1779 when Cook was received by the Hawaiian priest Koa’a in this manner. Published as plate 60 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, 3.294.
Provenance: Peter Wedde Antiques, Wellington, 1998
