Description

Extended Data

DAAO URL

https://www.daao.org.au/bio/jacques-etienne-victor-arago

Birth Place

Estagel, France

Biography

watercolourist and marine draughtsman, was born in Estagel, near Perpignan, France. He, Taunay and Pellion were the artists and draughtsmen employed on Louis de Freycinet’s officially-sponsored French expedition around the world aboard the Uranie in 1817-20. Arago wrote a series of letters to a friend giving an account of the voyage, published as Promenade autour du Monde (Paris 1822), which included three plates on Australian subjects and an atlas. The introduction by M. Gérard to the English translation, Nar rative of a Voyage round the World (London 1823), stated that Arago’s collection of drawings was 'one of the most remarkable that has been seen, both for the number and variety of the subjects. It offers the strongest proof of the unwearied zeal and remarkable intelligence of M. Arago, the draftsman to the expedition. It consists of about five hundred drawings representing landscapes, views of the coasts, the subjects of zoology and botany, also a considerable series of drawings of the natives of the different islands at which the expedition touched, their costume, their habits and weapons’. The Uranie left France in September 1817 and sailed via the Cape of Good Hope to Shark Bay in Western Australia, arriving on 12 September 1818. Arago’s Encounter with the Natives depicts a member of the ship’s company offering trinkets and clothing to the Aborigines while Arago himself performs on the castanets. Leaving Shark Bay on 27 September, the ship sailed via Timor and the Sandwich Islands to Sydney, where it remained from 19 November to 25 December 1819. Saying he had no absurd national prejudices, Arago accepted all offers of entertainment and sightseeing and enjoyed the physical beauties of the town. His watercolour taken from behind a stone fence above Campbell’s store, Une Vue du Port de Sidney, prise de l’Observatrice (Croquis d’apr é s nature) , dated 13 December 1819 (sold at Christie’s, South Kensington, on 28 May 1987), is a competent but oddly telescoped view of the east side of the harbour, including Government House and stables. It may have been done with the help of a camera lucida. Local excursions included a visit to John Oxley at Kirkham, Camden, resulting in A View when in the Interior of New Holland near the Torrent of Kinkham [sic] in his Narrative . Arago’s Les Sauvages des Environs de Sydney was included in the official Atlas volume of the voyage. The expedition returned to France via Cape Horn and Rio de Janeiro, arriving in November 1820. As well as his official sketches, Arago had made marginal drawings (including sketches of Aboriginal dwellings in Western Australia) in the manuscript journal kept by the Uranie 's assistant surgeon, Joseph Paul Gaimard. In Paris he drew illustrations and political caricature for the journal La Mode (1835) but later went blind, publishing his autobiography as Memoires d’un Aveugle . He died in Paris at the age of 65. Bernard Smith characterises Arago’s work as being 'highly coloured by romantic attitudes. He delighted in the portrayal of scenes of native prowess and violence … His View Taken in the Interior of New Holland afforded him the chance of combining his interest in native combat with that geological curiosity, the natural arch’. While he presented the Australian Aborigines as physically splendid and not undignified in battle, they compared unfavourably with his conception of the Polynesians as happy and free, 'romantic exemplars of the hard primitive life. The New Hollanders and Fuegians were by contrast little better than beasts’. Writers: Dixon, ChristineCallaway, Anita Date written: 1992 Last updated: 2011

Born

b. 1790

Summary

Watercolourist and marine draughtsman. Arago was employed on Louis de Freycinet's officially-sponsored French expedition around the world aboard the Uranie in 1817-20.

Gender

Male

Died

1855

Age at death

65