European Vision and the South Pacific. Second edition by Bernard Smith

HARDBACK minor scuffing and bumping to edges, small dent to front cover, small sticker to front end paper partly removed, tanned to end pages, with jacket, scuffed edges, one tiny closed tear, tanned inside. Navy boards with gilt spine titling, illustrated endpapers; 370pp., monochrome and colour illustrations. Illustrated dustwrapper

This classic study discusses the European interpretation of the Pacific in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It considers the work of artists attached to scientific voyages of discovery and exploration from the time of Cook to the time of Dumont d'Urville and elucidates the ways in which their work is related to the scientific interests and prevailing ideas of their era. Smith first analyses the role that the opening of the Pacific to Europeans played in the development and sustenance of romantic taste, in a new category of landscape, and in the formulation and acceptance in scientific circles of the theory of natural selection. Against this background, he then describes in detail the emergence of Australian colonial art, in terms of both its European origin and the geographical realities of the local environment.

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