topographical artist and naval officer, was lieutenant on the Thétis expedition to the South Seas in 1824-26 under the command of the French explorer Hyacinthe de Bougainville, eldest son of the eighteenth-century naval captain Louis de Bougainville. The commander had been given secret orders to report on the defence capabilities of British settlements, so when Thétis and Espérance arrived at Port Jackson in 1825 de Bougainville, his officers – and his artist – wandered as far afield as possible: to Botany Bay, Camden, the Warragamba River and the Blue Mountains. Perhaps La Touannne’s drawings were used to support de Bougainville’s official conclusion that although the settlement’s defences were poor the harbour was so deep and so protected as to be almost impregnable.

To the residents of Sydney, however, La Touanne’s work seemed more an appropriation of artistic copyright than a threat to British sovereignty. In the Sydney Gazette of 27 September 1826, it was noted:

While Mr Earle intends publishing views in the vicinity of Sydney, we should suggest to him the propriety of extending his views to the magnificent scenery in the vicinity of the King’s Table Land, the great Campbell’s Cataract, and the Regent’s Glen. These would be the more desirable from the circumstance that Commodore de BOUGAINVILLE intends publishing them in France, thus depriving our Colonial artists of the Credit of a first publication. The grandeur and magnificence of the Campbell [sic] cataract was so much admired by the French artists, that they declaimed it exceeded every thing they had seen during the whole of their expedition – to the extent of naming it after their commander. It is now called Wentworth Falls.

La Touanne published his Album Pittoresque de la Frégate La Thétis et de la Corvette L’Espérance’ , a folio of 35 lithographic plates relating to the voyage, in 1828, nine years before the official Journal appeared. It includes View Taken at the Junction of the Nepean River and Glenbrook Creek with Aborigines and kangaroos, View of the Norton Waterhole along the Nepean River with members of the expedition being rowed across the river in two boats watched by a group of Aborigines, and View Taken on the Nepean River below Mr Macarthur’s House in Camdenshire , another topographical view with a group of Aborigines. All the figures were added in Paris by V. Adam. When de Bougainville’s Journal of the expedition was finally published in Paris in 1837 it included seven New South Wales subjects among its 56 engraved or lithographed plates after La Touanne: views of Fort Macquarie, the Government Gardens, the monument erected to the memory of La Perouse, Junction of the Nepean and the Warragamba , Summit of the Bougainville Cataract [Wentworth Falls] and the Nepean River below John Macarthur’s house. This time the European and classicised Aboriginal figures were added by Bayot.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011