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from another intrepid and successful expedition, ‘publishers telegraphed offers for the book which they surmised he would write; newspaper correspondents came to him for a preliminary account of his travels’. 2 Exploration, it seemed, was as much about the public presentation and dissemination of its results as it was about sourcing interminable rivers or crossing desert wastelands. This was also the case in the career of Thomas Baines, whose life as an artist, explorer, and curator is at least as interesting as that of
Recent cultural studies have demonstrated the weakness of some of the fashionable theoretical positions adopted by scholars of imperialism in recent times. This book explores the diverse roles played by museums and their curators in moulding and representing the British imperial experience. The British Empire yielded much material for British museums, particularly in terms of ethnographic collections. The collection of essays demonstrates how individuals, their curatorial practices, and intellectual and political agendas influenced the development of a variety of museums across the globe. It suggests that Thomas Baines was deeply engaged with the public presentation, display and interpretation of material culture, and the dissemination of knowledge and information about the places he travelled. He introduced many people to the world beyond Norfolk. A discussion of visitor engagement with non-European material cultures in the provincial museum critiques the assumption of the pervasive nature of curatorial control of audience reception follows. The early 1900s, the New Zealand displays at world's fairs presented a vision of Maoriland, which often had direct Maori input. From its inception, the National Museum of Victoria performed the dual roles of research and public education. The book also discusses the collections at Australian War Memorial, Zanzibar Museum, and Sierra Leone's National Museum. The amateur enthusiasms and colonial museum policy in British West Africa are also highlighted. Finally, the book follows the journey of a single object, Tipu's Tiger, from India back to London.
Knowledge about the life and work of artist-explorer John Thomas Baines (1820–75) has become well established in academic circles since J. P. R. Wallis, in 1941, focused a spotlight on Baines’ oeuvre and career. 1 Later biographies have added fresh dimensions to Baines scholarship, establishing him as a remarkably talented and versatile artist, explorer, cartographer, and journal writer. 2 Given the volume of attention paid to Baines over the years, it is surprising that there still remains material awaiting discovery. This has nonetheless proved true of
Great Britain’s dependencies with fifty or sixty thousand volumes’. 40 Thomas Baines spent many hours in the reading room, whetting his appetite for travelling in the interior by absorbing the accounts of such writers as William Cornwallis Harris, to whom he refers repeatedly in his journals. The fruits of this perusing in the library were not merely the inculcation of a desire to surpass his
to describe and depict. Thomas Baines’s expedition to the Victoria Falls with James Chapman, and its painted and published results, is one of the most striking examples of European engagement with landscape in the region. It is worth considering as it crystallises some of the central themes running through this book. Baines visited the Falls in 1862, becoming one of the first Europeans to gaze upon
nature, made at a specific time and place. The title page of Thomas Baines’s series of lithographs of the Victoria Falls includes a reference to their being derived from drawings sketched ‘on the spot’. 8 So pervasive was this that even a lesser-known work, like Butler’s South African sketches , is presented as consisting of those impressions of wildlife recorded by the hunter ‘on [the
and understand the unfamiliarity of new spaces, unusual topographies and the things and people that occupied them. On a practical level, the vocabulary of theatre was a convenient way to convey this. Thomas Baines, for example, recorded a scene on his journey to Grahamstown in March 1848. As his party proceeded, ‘the hills opening in the centre, as if like the scenes of a theatre they had been drawn
Hartley, together with the Boer hunters Jan Viljoen and Piet Jacobs, secured permission from Mzilikazi to hunt in Shona country up to the Umfuli river. In his later expeditions, between 1866 and 1868, Hartley teamed up with Karl Mauch, combining ivory hunting with gold prospecting. 2 Adam Render or Renders settled in the area of Great Zimbabwe in 1867 or 1868 as an ivory hunter-trader. Thomas Baines
with a glad and thrilling heart, I shook off, as it were, from my feet the dust of the city, and went forth alone to the uttermost ends of the earth. 2 In 1883, eight years after the death of Thomas Baines, Robert White sent a tablet to Durban to commemorate the artist, with instructions for it to be set in the local Anglican church. It testified
, Nicholas Chevalier and Thomas Baines, formed the basis of a visual vocabulary via which Australian identity could be articulated. What these artists primarily depicted was the difference of the Australian landscape in the eyes of its non-indigenous observers. These images formed the basis of a visual and iconographic vocabulary of Australia, depicting specific colonial landscapes