The extraordinary range of paintings produced during or immediately after the three voyages of James Cook to the Pacific – a small selection of which are exhibited in The Art and Science of Exploration 1768-80, a new long-term exhibition opening this month at the Queen’s House, Greenwich – revealed to eighteenth-century Europe a new and unknown world. Today, it is perhaps only in the wonderful strangeness of images of space, such as the photographs of Saturn sent to Earth this year from the NASA Cassini mission, that we can find some echoes of the initial impact of these pictures, which made real the setting of centuries of myth and speculation.

If Cassini is in many ways a direct descendant of Cook’s floating laboratories and their long-running expeditions to gather data about strange new places, it has also inherited some of the ambiguities of visualising and popularising this information. Like the cameras, filters, and computer programmes of the Cassini team, the pencils and paintbrushes of voyage artists like William Hodges and John Webber were intended to create an accurate scientific record, but also to render knowledge comprehensible, beautiful, or inspiring, and to justify and raise public interest – and thus public funding. As this exhibition reminds us, artists on the Resolution were instructed by the Admiralty ‘to make Drawings and Paintings of such places in the Countries you may touch at … as may be proper to give a more perfect idea thereof than can be formed from written descriptions only.’ They recorded the topography of islands, the appearance of new birds and animals, the lives of native people, and the exact formation of natural phenomena such as icebergs, waterspouts and storms for the benefit of scientists and theorists back home. But these artists also had ambitions to create works which would please viewers as engraved illustrations, or better yet, as oil paintings on the walls of prestigious institutions such as the Royal Academy. John Webber’s startling scene of a walrus hunt in the Arctic, for example, follows heroic as well as scientific conventions and was shown at Somerset House in 1784, at the height of popular Cook-mania. 

One consequence of these multiple and sometimes conflicting aims has been that galleries and museums have been unsure how to interpret works by Cook’s voyage artists, or even if they are worth acquiring and exhibiting at all. Nevertheless, following a slow renewal of academic attention beginning with Bernard Smith’s 1960 study, European Vision and the South Pacific, and continuing with a resurgence of interest in their significance for New Zealander, Australian, Canadian and Pacific histories, in the last few decades many of these pictures have emerged from Admiralty House and private collections, and gained fresh public recognition. A new, free, and long-term exhibition, The Art and Science of Exploration is a step in the recovery of these works and their moment in world art history.

Particularly high-profile are two recently-acquired paintings by George Stubbs, of a kangaroo and a dingo encountered by Cook and Joseph Banks in Australia. Fascinating glimpses of what must have seemed astoundingly alien wildlife, these pictures are however perhaps anomalous, as images created later, by a stay-at-home artist who had never seen the creatures he painted but relied on the notes and specimens of others. In contrast, the impressionistic handling and snap-shot composition of some of Hodges’ landscapes – many clearly painted from the viewpoint of a ship’s deck – suggest vividly the artist as eyewitness, feverishly recording as many of the sights of the voyage as he could. Works by Hodges, from rough topographical sketches of the Marquesas Islands to the classical arcadias of large, studio-finished paintings such as Tahiti Revisited, dominate the small exhibition space; which has been kept light and simple, making the most of the elegant seventeenth-century architecture of the Queen’s House. It is an understated approach, especially in comparison to the bells, whistles, and touch-screens in Ships, Clocks and Stars: The Quest for Longitude in the National Maritime Museum next door (see the Criticks review by Paul Stock), which includes several more artworks from Cook’s voyages. The difference between the two shows underlines the decision at the Queen’s House to treat these pictures as works of art, rather than primarily as historical illustrations. Information boards near the entrance provide biographies of Stubbs, Hodges, Webber, and Johann Zoffany, but not of Cook or Banks. Neither – perhaps more problematically – is much information offered about the history and people of the regions visited; either those depicted, or those, like the Polynesian navigator Tupaia, who were central to the expeditions’ ability to find, interpret and survive. 

The focus, then, is in general on the paintings as images and their place within Western art history, rather than as documents of historical encounter. This does not mean, though, that The Art and Science of Exploration does not have a story to tell. Stubbs’ charismatic animal portraits, as well as a small room demonstrating the process of botanical illustration through two sketches of Australian plants, illuminate the crucial role of these voyages in the development of British natural sciences. At the same time, the curators do not entirely escape the lure of what the Pacific historian Epeli Hau’ofa has called the ‘superstar’ status of the world-famous ‘ghost of Captain Cook.’ As viewers walk into the exhibition, they are greeted on the right by Hodges’ melancholy, intimate portrait of the British navigator, as well as by the imagined scene of his death in Hawaii, in a large unfinished canvas by Zoffany. Although the artist at one point planned to join the Resolution’s first expedition, the arrangements fell through and he never travelled to the Pacific. This picture, not started until the 1790s and possibly inspired by the pantomime Death of Captain Cook the artist watched at Covent Garden, is, then, an uneasy, though intriguing fit with the other works in the exhibition, combining detailed, almost anthropological attention to Hawaiian costume and weapons with a highly theatrical composition and figures borrowed from classical tradition. In particular, it can be seen in dialogue with a neighbouring portrait by Webber, Poedua, the Daughter of Orio, which casts a teenage Polynesian woman held hostage on the Resolution in the role of an exotic Venus: like Zoffany’s, this is a beautiful image, but in the context of its production and the subsequent history of the Pacific, it is also a troubling one.

For the last few years, it has been one of the small miracles of London that paintings as stunning and internationally important as Poedua or Tahiti Revisited can be viewed casually and for free in the handsome but unassuming setting of the Queen’s House. The ambition of The Art and Science of Exploration is to make these pictures, in all their complexity, better known and appreciated.

The Art and Science of Exploration 1768-80 is a new long-term exhibition at The Queen’s House, Greenwich, open until July 2015. The Stubbs paintings will be on display until 25 January 2015. The exhibition is part of Royal Museums Greenwich’s Longitude Season.