Deutscher and Hackett

Drawing related to the “Port-Jackson, Nlle. Hollande: cérémonie préliminaire d’un mariage, chez les sauvages” plate in the Freycinet atlas of 1825.

This is the first of two remarkable working sketches by Petit, showing him trying to balance this violent scene. As many historians have commented (Konishi, Starbuck), there is no record of the French artist actually witnessing this scene, which would seem to derive, at least in part, from a written passage on “Courtship and Marriage” in David Collins’s published work, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (1798). The scene would have an afterlife when a version was included at the base of the famous Sydney Punchbowl, now in the State Library of New South Wales, that was commissioned and made in China in the 1820s. That the drawings in both lots 12 and 13 show letterfolds suggests that they are possibly the original artwork connected to the manufacture of the Sydney Punchbowl. A replica of this bowl was commissioned by Hordern House in 2013: examples are held by the State Library as well as Government House, Sydney.

The basic composition here bears comparison with the finished plate except that by the time of publication a third man had been added to the group holding onto the woman on the left (a further hint, if any was needed, of the “classical” design of this scene – despite the shocking nature of the subject it is one of the times that Petit’s training under David seems most obtrusive). Here, as in the finished image, the woman is mostly facing away from the viewer.

Despite its sense of having been constructed from different parts and given an invented structure, there is still a strong sense that all of the figures are individually identified, which does add to the importance of the work, and which may help further unravel some of the mysteries of the New South Wales portraits. It is, moreover, most unusual to have any surviving examples which show Petit’s style of working on these composite scenes.

That no engraving was originally completed is basically confirmed by the fact that by the time it was included in the Freycinet account in 1825, it was noted as “dess.” by one of the Freycinet-era artists that worked on the Uranie images in Paris, Sébastien Leroy, after Petit’s original.

It is difficult to be sure about the way in which this and the second similar study (lot 13) were actually composed. It is on a paper-stock definitely associated with other voyage works, particularly with Port Jackson drawings lots 10 and 11 which are on the same paper, and we can therefore reasonably assume that it was done on the voyage; perhaps the major additions such as the man who has clearly been added at left could be later. All of this is complicated by the sketches on the verso of both sheets (see lots 12b and 13b following) which might just as well be shipboard sketches (not dissimilar, for example, to the sort dashed off by Lesueur).

Péron’s note at top right, and similar notes on the Timor drawings lots 2 and 3 and a related note on the related drawing lot 13, all attest to the images having been planned for publication in the first edition of the Baudin account (and obviously before Péron’s death in 1810), though none was in fact published until the second edition of Baudin’s voyage.