Reference: in Hordern House, rare books, manuscripts, paintings.
27. MELVILLE, Harden Sidney (1824-1894).
[Torres Strait Canoe and five men at the site of a wreck on the Sir Charles Hardy Islands, off Cape Grenville, North East Australia].
Painted in oil on a 740 x 1250 mm canvas stretcher, framed size 1050 x 1550 mm; signed “H.S. Melville” at lower left and dated ‘1874’, with evidence of the signature and date having been over-painted by the artist, so likely to have been begun earlier; in the original ornate gilt frame.
England, completed 1874.
Provenance: Private Australian collection since purchase in London in the 1970s.
A recently discovered large and atmospheric oil painting set in the northern reaches of the Great Barrier Reef, by the artist who explored the coastal regions of Australia with Francis Price Blackwood on HMS Fly in the 1840s.
Enormous and imposing, the painting is dominated by the dramatic central ground of the curious rock formation, home to hundreds of sea-birds, but it is the foreground and the drama of the beautifully depicted canoe from the Torres Strait, as well as the hints of tragedy in the flotsam of a wrecked trading vessel on the beach, that show Melville as an historical painter at the height of his powers. More, it is unlike any other known work of his: a late career oil painting which upholds all the characteristics of a topographical painting, and which relates directly to his time sailing with Blackwood.
Melville remains an enigmatic figure. He had a long and varied career as an artist in England, but for more than thirty years he continually returned to the subject of his adventures as a young man in remote Australian waters, contributing a series of magnificent plates to two separate books on the voyage, Joseph Beete Jukes’s Narrative (1847) and his own Sketches in Australia (1849), as well as experiencing a mid- career revival of enthusiasm for the experience, not least with the publication of his delightful memoir, the Adventures of a Griffin (1867). Understood in these terms, this painting shows him returning to work on Australian themes on a major scale.
Although the style and history of the painting mark it out as unmistakably a major work relating to the Coral Sea, any original caption has long been lost, which makes the fact that the locality of the scene can now be confirmed of the greatest significance: it can be shown to be depicting events ashore on the Sir Charles Hardy Islands, just off Cape Grenville near the northern tip of the Cape York peninsula. This was a region the Fly first visited in July 1843, which became a base and “frequent resort” (Jukes, Narrative, vol. I, p. 126) for them the following winter in 1844, when they were overseeing the building of the shipping beacon on nearby Raine’s Island (the latter was so small and inhospitable, and so lacking in any safe anchorage, that the Fly and its attendant boats shuttled back and forth to the Sir Charles Hardy Islands during this period).
Melville’s time at the Sir Charles Hardy Islands and his intimate understanding of the work they were doing undoubtably gave shape to this painting. There can be no question that the star of the piece is the finely rendered and detailed depiction of the striking outrigger canoe, a splendid example of the canoes of the region of this era: a double rigger with some modifications for travelling in the open sea, quite elaborately decorated with designs painted on the hull and bow, and an elaborate stern piece, as are particularly associated with the Torres Strait at the time Melville was there. Furthermore, Melville’s published images have long been considered in a sense the type specimens of the European study of these beautiful vessels.
The identification of the scene is confirmed by the discovery of a caption to a small wood-engraving of the distinctive rock formation (but not the canoe) that Melville contributed to an obscure popular work of geography in 1864, and is further confirmed by a comment in his memoir about stepping ashore on the Islands and being very taken with some “picturesque porphyry rocks on the beach, one of which had the appearance of an old castle” (Adventures of a Griffin, p. 126).
That the Torres Strait Islanders frequented these remote islands was, of course, no surprise to anybody on board the Fly or its tender, the Bramble, as is well-documented in the published accounts and logs, while Melville himself was fascinated by their magnificent canoes, publishing a number of engraved illustrations of them in his various publications. Similarly, the painting’s emphasis on both the sea- voyaging of the Islanders and the wrecks of European ships is a subtle reminder that one of the main impulses behind outfitting the voyage had been the loss of the Charles Eaton, run aground on the ‘Great Detached Reef’ just to the east in 1834, only for the survivors to be massacred on nearby Boydang Cay by men from the Torres Strait who had voyaged south on a fishing expedition: the two boys who survived these bitter travails were ultimately rescued two years later from Mer (Murray Island) in the Torres Strait proper, having been taken north with their captors.
Melville was not quite 18 years old when he first met Blackwood and agreed to accompany him on the voyage to Australia. Blackwood (1809–1854) was an accomplished naval officer, who first undertook hydrographic work in Australia while in command of HMS Hyacinth in the mid-1830s. In no small part because of this experience, he was then appointed to command HMS Fly, a lavishly equipped vessel that sailed in 1842 to continue the Admiralty hydrographic survey, with a particular focus on the Great Barrier Reef, the islands of the Torres Strait, the north coast as far as Port Essington (the Cobourg Peninsula) and the southern waters of New Guinea (notably the Fly River). The only narrative of the voyage, the last of the major British survey voyages to concentrate on Australian waters, following those of Cook, Flinders, King and the last voyage of the Beagle, is the thrilling work by the geologist on board, Joseph Beete Jukes (1811–1869). Jukes’s work is enriched by a series of superb plates based on Melville’s drawings, followed just two years later by Melville’s remarkable series of lithographs with the modest title Sketches in Australia (1849), now recognised as a foundation work of particular importance for the Great Barrier Reef and the north coast generally.
Melville was very much in the tradition of some of the specialist artists who had sailed on major voyages of exploration before him: one thinks of William Hodges (from Cook’s second voyage), John Webber (Cook’s third), William Westall (Flinders), Jacques Arago (Freycinet) or Louis Choris (Kotzebue); he shared their ability to capture scenes from the life, their complete immersion in the worlds they visited, and even their willingness to experiment with the latest technical innovations when it came to publishing their views and portraits. His devotion to topographical and ethnographical realism, his great popularity as an illustrator, and his ability to imbue his work with a charged and dramatic atmosphere, provide a reminder of his abundant talent.
It is also significant that despite Melville being very much part of this tradition of voyage artists, this is an extremely rare example of a large format, exhibition-quality, work in oils relating to the east coast of Australia, and one of only a handful of works done by any voyage artist personally familiar with the Reef. The most obvious comparison, both in locality and artistic method, is the work of his now famous predecessor, William Westall, who also produced a series of studio oils based on his sketches of sailing with Matthew Flinders on the Investigator: not least, despite never achieving the great successes with his voyage paintings of which he had dreamed, just like Westall, Melville continued to return to Australian themes (on Westall, who was still diligently working on a picture of the wrecks of the Porpoise
and Cato on the southern edge of the Great Barrier Reef when he died in 1850, see Smith, European Vision, p. 197).
Any documentation relating to Blackwood and the voyage of the Fly is a truly important rediscovery, not least because it is among the least studied and least documented of any of the early voyages of exploration in the region or indeed in Australia generally. Melville’s studies of the Torres Strait in particular are considered the most important and extensive documentation by any Western artist of the region as it was drawn into the sphere of British influence.
The sea-voyaging of the Torres Strait Islanders, the fraught history of interactions between local tribes and Europeans, the great and tragic history of wrecks in the region, and the artist’s own fascination with their canoes all contributed to Melville’s painting, and lend it a drama and immediacy befitting a work of its kind.
A more detailed cataloguing of this work has been prepared and is available on our website at: https://www.hordern.com/book.php?id=4505082
Literature: JUKES, Joseph Beete. Narrative of the Surveying Voyage of H.M.S. Fly, 1847; [MELVILLE, Harden S.] The Adventures of a Griffin on a Voyage of Discovery. Written by Himself, 1867; Sketches in Australia and the adjacent islands, 1849.
Publishing details: Hordern House, Aug 6, 2020, pb, 78pp.
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