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Overview
This small watercolour and pencil drawing is an early ornithological record of two New Zealand birds: the pōpokotea/whitehead and the pīpipi/brown creeper. Initially, it was thought to be by William Swainson, a British naturalist who emigrated to Aotearoa in 1840. He lived mainly in the Hutt Valley until his death in 1855, but his life in New Zealand was difficult and he struggled to work as a naturalist or artist. He doesn’t appear to have painted any birds after arriving here, and it seems unlikely that the original attribution of the work is correct. Rather, as ornithologists Geoff Norman, Ray Ching and Ross Galbreath have noted, this watercolour relates to plate 5 in John Richardson and John Edward Gray (ed.s), The zoology of the voyage of HMS Erebus & Terror, under the command of Captain Sir James Clark Ross, during the years 1839 to 1843. By authority of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. Volume 1. Mammalia, birds (London, 1844-75). Richardson and Gray’s book is an account of a scientific expedition into the Southern Pacific, and to Antarctica. In the expedition two ships (the Erebus and the Terror) travelled from England in 1839. They made three trips into the Antarctic, resupplying in Australia, New Zealand and the Falkland Islands between these journeys. Their visit to New Zealand consisted of several weeks in the Bay of Islands in August 1841. Numerous specimens and natural history objects were collected on the expedition, and after its return the British government gave £1000 for the publication of the botanical and zoological findings. The zoological portion was published in 24 parts between 1844 and 1875. The section on birds was written largely by George Robert Gray, an ornithologist at the British Museum. Plate 5 was included in the first part, issued in October 1844.
It is not clear who the plate’s artist was. The majority of the book’s bird plates have no recorded artist – the only exception to this is a small group of 6 plates, all issued with the publication’s last part in 1874, which were by the German artist Joseph Wolf. Wolf’s plates are all inscribed with his name, and as Wolf only began working at the British Museum in 1848, it is unlikely that he was the artist of the 1844 plates. In 1906 Richard Bowdler-Sharpe, a bird curator at the British Museum, suggested that David William Mitchell (1813–1859, then the secretary of the Zoological Society) illustrated the birds in the Erebus and Terror publication. It is possible that plate 5 is by Mitchell, who was at the British Museum illustrating George Robert Gray’s Genera of birds (1844-49) at the same time. The drawing offered here may be the original sketch for the lithograph published in Gray’s book (Ray Ching believes this is the case) or it may be a copy, drawn from the published plate.
George Robert Gray’s publication is one of the earliest European records of New Zealand birds. Walter Buller’s History of the birds of New Zealand (1873) begins by describing Gray’s book, highlighting its significance to 19th-century ornithologists. This drawing is an important link to the book, and to early 19th-century scientific expeditions into the Pacific. If it is the original drawing for the published plate, then it is a wonderful illustration of the process from watercolour sketch to lithography. If it is a copy of the published plate, then it captures the wider 19th-century circulation and study of scientific images.