English, 1784
Copper plate engraving on laid paper
24 x 20 inches (61 x 50.8 cm) including archival mat
Provenance: Lahaina Printsellers, Maui, Hawaii; Randy Nagatani, Honolulu, Hawaii
Two figures face each other at the center of the plate with fists raised and one foot advanced, each wearing a length of cloth wrapped from waist to ankle, the ground between them worked in fine parallel lines that carry the light across an open clearing. Behind them a crowd sits and stands in a dense band, some watching the pair and others turned away in conversation, with palms rising at the left and a stand of trees closing the composition at the right beneath a sky of open hatching. The impression is printed with the plate mark visible outside the image and the engraved title lettered in the lower margin, and the sheet retains its full margins within a modern archival mat.
John Webber, 1751 to 1793, was a London born painter of Swiss descent who trained in Bern and Paris before being appointed official artist to Captain Cook's third voyage in 1776. He sailed aboard the Resolution for four years and produced the drawings that recorded the Pacific, the Northwest Coast, and Hawaii, including the only eyewitness images of Cook's death at Kealakekua Bay. His work was engraved for the official atlas published in London in 1784, which supplied Europe with its first sustained visual account of the Pacific. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1791 and his drawings are held in the British Museum, the National Maritime Museum, and the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.
We ship free anywhere in the world, fully insured, packed by hand.
English, 1784
Copper plate engraving on laid paper
24 x 20 inches (61 x 50.8 cm) including archival mat
Provenance: Lahaina Printsellers, Maui, Hawaii; Randy Nagatani, Honolulu, Hawaii
Two figures face each other at the center of the plate with fists raised and one foot advanced, each wearing a length of cloth wrapped from waist to ankle, the ground between them worked in fine parallel lines that carry the light across an open clearing. Behind them a crowd sits and stands in a dense band, some watching the pair and others turned away in conversation, with palms rising at the left and a stand of trees closing the composition at the right beneath a sky of open hatching. The impression is printed with the plate mark visible outside the image and the engraved title lettered in the lower margin, and the sheet retains its full margins within a modern archival mat.
John Webber, 1751 to 1793, was a London born painter of Swiss descent who trained in Bern and Paris before being appointed official artist to Captain Cook's third voyage in 1776. He sailed aboard the Resolution for four years and produced the drawings that recorded the Pacific, the Northwest Coast, and Hawaii, including the only eyewitness images of Cook's death at Kealakekua Bay. His work was engraved for the official atlas published in London in 1784, which supplied Europe with its first sustained visual account of the Pacific. He was elected a Royal Academician in 1791 and his drawings are held in the British Museum, the National Maritime Museum, and the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.
We ship free anywhere in the world, fully insured, packed by hand.
