Artist: William Woollett (1735-1785) after William Hodges (1744-1797)
Title: A Toupapow with a corpse on it attended by the chief mourner in his habit of ceremony
Date: 1777
School: British, XVIIIth-century
Medium: engraving
Dimensions: 242 x 390mm (plate), 295 x 460mm (sheet)
Watermark: fragment of Heawood 1317(?), Paris 1772? See image below
Inscriptions/marks: In the plate lower left border <<Drawn from Nature by W. Hodges>>; in the plate lower centre border <<A TOUPAPOW WITH A CORPSE ON IT/Attended by the Chief Mourner in his Habit of Ceremony./Publish’d Feb. 1st 1777, by W. Strahan in New Street Shoe Lane, & Thos Cadell in the Strand, London.>>; in the plate lower right border <<Engrav’d by W. Woollett/NoXLIV
Condition: Fair condition on laid paper with folds, tear on right border not encroaching on image, matt burn
Description: A scene of burial and morning in Tahiti observed by Cook and Hodges in August 1773. Engraved illustration to James Cook, A Voyage towards the South Pole and Round the World, performed by His Majesty’s Ships the RESOLUTION and ADVENTURE, in the years 1772, 1773, 1774 and 1775, 2 vols., London, W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1777, I, plate XLIV, fp. 184.
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, 2.52A
Provenance: Peter Wedde Antiques, Wellington, 1999
