Case 22, 2012/13: a collection of works by Thomas Baines, North Australian Expedition 1855-1857

Expert adviser’s statement

Reviewing Committee Secretary’s note: Please note that any illustrations referred to have not been reproduced on the Arts Council Website

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. Brief Description of item(s)

1. 21 oil paintings on canvas, all measuring 45.1 x 66 cm. 2. Four notebooks containing a letter, studio photograph of Baines and 272 drawings and watercolours, mainly of North-Western Australia but also of Port Jackson and of Timor and other Indonesian islands, all taken in the course of Arthur Gregory’s expedition to northern Australia 3. 9 folding panoramas 4. 7 unframed drawings and watercolours of various sizes 5. One chart and route traverse in pencil, pen, ink and watercolour showing the tracks of the ships involved in the expedition, measuring overall 124.5 x 155.6 cm.

All the paintings, watercolours, drawings and the chart are by Thomas Baines (King’s Lynne 1820- 1875). Between 1841 and the early 1860s, Baines worked as artist to a succession of British expeditions, initially to Australia and later in Africa, where he accompanied Livingstone.

2. Context

The paintings and watercolours under consideration were commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society which played a large part in inspiring and financing the Gregory expedition to northern Australia of 1855-6. They were delivered to the RGS by Baines on his return to the United Kingdom in 1857. They have remained an important part of the RGS’s outstanding archive relating to exploration, and particularly featuring the papers of Speke and Livingstone, ever since.

Parts of this collection have been microfilmed in the past – and the National Library of Australia holds one such microfilm.

3. Waverley criteria

This collection of paintings, maps and drawings by Thomas Baines is so closely connected with British history and national life that its export would be a misfortune:

1. The collection as a whole is a quite exceptionally complete record of the activities and objectives of the sort of geographical expedition that was a quintessential expression of Victorian England’s interaction with the world beyond Europe. The fact that the collection was commissioned by the Royal Geographical Society, the creation of which a generation earlier was an outstanding expression of British mid-nineteenth century values, further underlines this point. Because of its completeness, the export of this collection would represent a severe loss for future researchers investigating the phenomenon of British exploration and (its usual concommitant) colonisation at the height of Empire.

2. While the subject matter of many of the paintings and drawings was primarily intended for information purposes, showing episodes during the Gregory expedition and the landscapes and the peoples encountered, many of the depictions are so overlaid with specifically Victorian sensibilities, ethics and cultural assumptions as to shed important light as much on mid- nineteenth century Britain as on the landscape and peoples of northern Australia which were the official objective of Gregory’s mission (though it should be emphasised that a sizeable percentage of the Baines collection relates to Indonesia and not Australia.). Thus the oil paintings include such subjects as ‘The horses of the . . .Expedition , attacked by alligators’ or ‘Baines and Bowman meeting a hostile tribe on the banks of the Baines River’, the first a typical subject for popular boys’ books at the time, and the second laden with value judgements, starting with the very obviously English name of the river which was presumably known by the ‘hostile tribe’ by another.

DETAILED CASE

1. Detailed description of item(s) if more than in Executive summary, and any comments.

The paintings, watercolours and drawings depict incidents during the Gregory expedition, some of the personalities involved and the landscapes and peoples encountered. They are exceptional :

i. for their completeness ii. because they extend the range of exploration art beyond the limits set by previous expedition artists by including depictions of incidents that occurred in the course of the expedition and iii. because Baines, having been commissioned by the RGS, was working independently of the expedition’s leader, Arthur Gregory, unlike the artists on previous expeditions whose work had been defined and controlled by expedition leaders.

While the majority of the oils and watercolours relate to north-western Australia, there is a painted panorama of Sydney and numerous depictions of scenes and peoples in what is now Indonesia and Timor (specifically Timor, Java and Bali).

The paintings and watercolours filter the reality of nineteenth-century northern Australia and the East Indies through British values and assumptions. As a result the depictions probably embedded existing British assumptions about the ‘hostility’ and ‘superstitions’ (to quote from some of the titles of the artworks) of the native population, rather than conveying objective information. The gulf between the British vision, seemingly validated by the drawings, and the actual reality may help to explain the failures of subsequent British and Australian policies in the regions and particularly their treatment of the local population.

2. Detailed explanation of the outstanding significance of the item(s).

Much of the historical significance of this collection stems from its having been commissioned by its previous owners, the Royal Geographical Society .

Thomas Baines is still regarded with pride in King’s Lynne and an ongoing campaign is being waged by the mayor to ‘repatriate’ some 40 of his artworks that had been sent to what was then Southern on loan by King’s Lynn Council in 1947 and not returned. See http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/priceless_paintings_could_be_returned_to_king _s_lynn_from_zimbabwe_1_1476558

The Natural History Museum has a large collection of African drawings by Baines and the British Museum has one African painting by him. I am not aware of any other institution that has any of his Australian work.