Clianthus puniceus (G.Don) Banks & Solander ex Lindley

Sydney Parkinson (c. 1745–1771) was a Scottish botanical illustrator and natural history artist. He was the first European artist to visit Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti, and to draw their plants and people.

Parkinson was employed by Sir Joseph Banks to travel with him on James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific in 1768, in HMS Endeavour. Taking over as the sole artist when the topographical draftsman Alexander Buchan died in Tahiti, Parkinson made nearly a thousand drawings of plants and animals collected by Banks and Daniel Solander on the voyage. He had to work in difficult conditions, living and working in a small cabin surrounded by hundreds of specimens. In Tahiti he was plagued by swarms of flies which ate the paint as he worked.

At the beginning of the voyage Parkinson was able to keep pace with the discoveries being made. However as the voyage progressed, the number of new specimens being found overwhelmed him and he had to adapt the way he worked in order to keep pace!  
​He completed sketches and coloured these in part so as to indicate the colours seen. The herbarium specimens returning to England would have course lost most if not all their colour as they dried and the colour sketches were needed to help make sense of them.

Parkinson died at sea aged just 25 on the way to Cape Town of dysentery contracted at Princes' Island, off the western end of Java. Banks paid his outstanding salary to his brother. Parkinson is commemorated in the common and scientific name of the Parkinson's petrel Procellaria parkinsoni. The great Florilegium of his work was finally published in 1988 by Alecto Historical Editions in 35 volumes and has since been digitised by the Natural History Museum in London.

This hand-coloured engraving is Plate 432 of the 1988 Banks' Florilegium, depicting the leaves and red flower of the well-known New Zealand native Kākā beak, Ngūtukaka, known botanically as Clianthus puniceus. Parkinson saw his first specimens of it in Tegadu (Anaura) Bay, north of Gisborne, in October 1769, and further examples in nearby Tolaga Bay.

See: 

Alecto Historical Editions, https://www.alecto-historical-editions.com/products/ahe-banks-prints-432

Botanical Art & Artists, https://www.botanicalartandartists.com/sydney-parkinson.html

Wikipedia, 'Sydney Parkinson', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Parkinson

Dr Mark Stocker  August 2018