Voyage of a painter

Natural History, April, 1998 by Errol Fuller

To the French sailors and scientists aboard Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste in March 1804, how welcoming and familiar France must have seemed after a three-and-a-half-year expedition to the little-known shores of Australia and Tasmania. The voyage had been dogged by disaster. Rifts between the crew and Captain Nicolas Baudin had caused defections. The rigors of the journey. had led to deaths. And the expedition had not succeeded in its mission to chart Australia's coast. The public, preoccupied by the Napoleonic Wars, had ignored the entire undertaking.

Nevertheless, the two ships returned with a vast collection of natural history specimens, including live wombats, kangaroos, and emus. Also aboard the ships was a great treasure: the preparatory drawings of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, who, at the age of twenty-two, had signed aboard Le Geographe as an assistant gunner and had taken over as expedition artist when the official artists jumped ship in Mauritius. From these drawings, he would eventually produce a series of exquisitely rendered watercolors on vellum, which were published between 1807 and 1816 in the expedition's official report, Voyage de Decouvertes aux Terres Australes.

Unsung throughout most of the English-speaking world and little known even in his native France, Lesueur is a familiar name only to those who have studied the early history of exploration in Australia. A remarkably complete archive of his letters, papers, and paintings is kept in his hometown of Le Havre, at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, which he was instrumental in establishing. What has been documented about Lesueur's life - the journey to Australia, the return to France, a long spell living in the United States, and a final homecoming to Le Havre, where he died in 1846 - is due largely to the efforts of Jacqueline Bonnemains, an archivist at Le Havre's natural history museum. Yet for all Bonnemains's work, Lesueur remains a shadowy figure. He has acquired little of the fame of John James Audubon, Joseph Wolf, or Edward Lear, yet his pictures of the early Australian scene are among the most historically important and beautiful records of nineteenth-century zoological discovery.

The impact of the strange Australian fauna on early explorers may not always be appreciated today. They found birds whose tails were shaped like lyres. They found mammals that laid eggs, carried their young in pouches, and were armed with poisonous spikes. As the eighteenth century turned to the nineteenth, creatures such as kangaroos, koalas, and wombats, unique to Australia, were like nothing Europeans had encountered before. The animal wonders of Africa, Asia, and the Americas were already fairly well known, but Australia was only just beginning to give up its secrets, and they were sometimes difficult for the European mind to accept. When the first stuffed duck-billed platypus arrived in England, it was famously condemned as an imposter; the beak of a duck was thought to have been skillfully and undetectably stuck to the body of an unknown, ratlike creature with a stumpy tail.

A decade or two earlier, seamen who had sailed with Captain James Cook had found it difficult to describe an encounter with a kangaroo; certainly their description was very basic. The first report came back of an animal that was "as large as a greyhound, of a mouse colour and very swift."

Later, the great naturalist Sir Joseph Banks tried to pen a clearer description but found himself at a complete loss: "To compare it to any European animal would be impossible as it has not the least resemblance of any one I have seen." The celebrated first painting of a kangaroo by George Stubbs, the famous English animal painter, looks as if the specimen he worked from had been pumped up like a football, which is, apparently, just what happened.

Lesueur's great achievement lay in his ability to convey the wonder that he felt in his encounters with such curious creatures. His compositions are unsophisticated and painstakingly honest. Some critics have suggested that they lack all lifelike quality, but Lesueur was operating at a time when the camera was not available to make clear the fleeting postures assumed by living creatures. He could only paint the creature that he saw in front of him. Sometimes this happened to be only a dried or crudely mounted specimen.

Lesueur produced all of his highly finished paintings in Paris after the expedition's return home, working from preserved specimens and the drawings that he'd brought back from the journey. A letter he wrote on October 27, 1817, gives some insight into the appearance of his studio: "If you see my room, it's a topsy-turvy world: the skins of fishes, spirit bottles, fossils, shells . . . and tortoises in the middle of all this." Many of Lesueur's drawings are preserved in Le Havre, alongside the watercolors on which his reputation largely rests.

Now, almost 200 years later, the voyages of Le Geographe and Le Naturaliste are chiefly remembered because they supplied Europe with a vast fund of scientific information. Captain Baudin's mission added immensely to knowledge of the Australian fauna and those places the expedition explored. The mission brought back 40,000 preserved animals, filling thirty-three large packing cases aboard Le Naturaliste, together with a similar quantity of botanical specimens. Altogether, there were upward of 100,000 dried or preserved organisms, 2,500 of which were undescribed species.