Art Gallery of New South Wales / National Gallery of Australia
Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique
270 x 210mm, 48pp, Colour Illustrations, Soft Cover.
Selected Title
Australian: $35 (Approx. US $37, Euro €28)
Out of Print
ISBN 0642541523
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About the Book
The panoramic Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique is visually splendid as it is richly evocative and informative. The woodcut and gouache panels were designed by Jean-Gabriel Charvet and produced by Joseph Dufour. They display the fascination for the exotic and unseen world that lay beyond the then unknown horizons but which had been touched and glimpsed by Bougainville, la Perouse, Cook and other explorers on their voyages to the Pacific at the end of the eighteenth century. These panels are colourful, theatrical, full of detail both real and imagined; they are a pageant of ideals, of a kind of imaginary Utopia peopled in the most unlikely way with a few familiar subjects, such as the Three Graces, amid the unfamiliar luxuriant tropics that serve to reassure and to perhaps lend a hint of European authority over unfamiliar cultural domains. And yet in the background the death of Cook hints at the possible conflicts to come.
About the Author
Australian Collection Focus Series no. 7 Art Gallery of New South Wales / National Gallery of Australia 2000