John Keyse Sherwin
after William Hodges
Otago
1777

Artist: John Keyse Sherwin (1751-1790) after William Hodges (1744-1797)
Title: Otago
Date: 1777
School: British XVIIIth-century
Medium: engraving and etching
Dimensions: 231 x 187mm (image), 271 x 213mm (support) trimmed
Watermark: indistinct
Inscriptions/marks: Lettered below image with title, production detail:<<Drawn from Nature by W. Hodges>>, <<Engrav’d by J. K. Sherwin>>, publication line, <<Published Feby. 1st. 1777 by Wm. Strahan in New Street Shoe Lane & Thos. Cadell in the Strand London>>, plate number <<“No. XL.>>
Condition: fair condition printed on laid paper, small tear lower right corner and part of the right corner missing
Description: half-length portrait of Otago (Ataongo), son of one of the leading chiefs of Tonga, holding a nail to his head and with the two joints of his little finger missing. Based on a red chalk drawing by William Hodges made during Cook’s visit to Tongatapu in October 1773. The drawing is now in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. The print was published to illustrate the official account of the voyage, James Cook, A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World….1775, 2 vols., London, W. Strahan and T Cadell, 1777, I, plate XL, fp. 197.
Reference: Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith, The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, Volume Two, The Voyage of the Resolution & Adventure 1772-1775, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1985, p. 68
Provenance: Art + Object, Auckland