Artist: William Sharp (1749-1824) after John Webber (1751-1793)
Title: A Man of Mangea
Date: 1784
School: British, XVIIIth-century
Medium: engraving
Dimensions: 240 x 304mm (plate), 565 x 430mm (sheet)
Watermark: Dovecote/Colombier, French 18th-century (see image below)
Inscriptions/marks: in the plate lower left border <<J. Webber del.>>, in the plate lower contre border <<A MAN of MANGEA.>>, in the plate lower right border <<W. Sharp sculp.>>, in the plate upper right border <<11>>. On the image lower right plate mark, a blind stamp in the form of a tulip flower (see image below). Blind stamps of various floriated forms appear on the right-hand bottom corner of the plate mark on almost all the published impressions of the Atlas plates. Their significance is yet to be determined. They may register some sort of quality control by the printers.
Condition: good condition of an impression on an uncut sheet with wide margins. 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 Mourua, a man from Mangaia in the Cook Islands, with a knife inserted in a slit in his right ear, and his hair tied up in a bun. Mourua came out to meet Cook in a canoe and transferred to one of their boats and then went on board. This event is recorded as taking place in March 1777. Published as plate 11 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, 3.29-3.31.
Provenance: Peter Wedde Antiques, Wellington, 1998
