painter, draughtsman, scholar and naval officer, was born in Paris on 2 March 1806. He entered the navy in 1820 and within twenty years had participated in three major voyages to the Pacific, visiting Australia twice (1826 and 1827-28) on board the Astrolabe in the company of de Sainson and Lauvergne . The commander, Dumont D’Urville, 'instructed M. Pâris, who has a great taste for drawing, to record all the canoes of the various peoples we would visit, and he acquitted himself of this task in a very satisfying manner. The collection of these drawings … will show immediately the different advances made by these populations towards naval construction’. The atlas illustrating this voyage contains a number of plates by Pâris, none of an Australian subject. His drawing of a canoe at Jervis Bay (NSW) is held in the Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris.

Within nine months of returning to France, Pâris was again en route for the Southern Hemisphere on board the Favorite under Laplace, revisiting Hobart Town and Sydney in July-September 1831. Once again, although several of his works are reproduced in the official atlas of the voyage, none is from Australia, but his view of A Mill at Paramatta [sic], Sept. 1831 (photograph, Musée de la Marine, Paris) nevertheless shows that he drew there. In addition an extensive collection of coastal profiles originating from this voyage, paralleling those drawn by Lauvergne on the same occasion, is on deposit in the French National Archives; four folios of this collection are devoted to Australia. Pâris’s final visit to Australia in the Art é mise , once again under the command of Laplace, took place in January-March 1839, with further visits to Hobart Town and Sydney. A dated view of the Port Arthur penitentiary (photograph, Musée de la Marine) became the basis of an engraving by de Laplante, published in Casimir Henricy’s Album Pittoresque d’un Voyage autour du Monde , entirely illustrated by Pâris and published in the 1880s.

One fruit of these voyages was Pâris’s Essai sur la Construition Navale des Peuples Extra-Europ éens , of which plate 112, engraved by Adam and Lemaître after Pâris, incorporates the canoe from Jervis Bay he had drawn in 1826. The accompanying commentary deserves to be quoted in full:

NEW HOLLAND. Before advancing further east, we shall stop briefly in New Holland, of which the miserable population, already largely replaced by the English, inspires neither the same pity nor the same regrets as the majority of those peoples whom the latter have destroyed to take possession of their land. It could almost be said that they have driven out only animals without skills, scarcely possessing the instinct to find shelter, to feed themselves on a few shell-fish and to half cover themselves in kangaroo skins: on the south coast, and in Van Diemen’s Land, the former inhabitants had never dared to venture on the water, and as no trace of them has been found for several years, it is supposed that they have been completely wiped out, although only forty years have elapsed since their island was occupied. Only at Jervis Bay, south of Port Jackson, did we see a canoe on the sand, 4 to 5 metres long, if however this name may be applied to a piece of bark tied at the ends (plate 112, fig. 1) and held open in the middle by flexible saplings, curved by a cord like a bow; this frail skiff had no form and could not have been able to travel very far. We do not know how the natives succeeded in removing such large pieces of bark from the handsome trees which cover the region around their bay, where, in 1826, the English had called only briefly and had not yet established a settlement. As for the canoes of the northern part of New Holland, of which the inhabitants are less weak and more courageous, they are probably scarcely worthy of notice, for no navigator mentions them.

Pâris’s subsequent career, with steam navigation matters an outstanding speciality, was studded with promotions (he reached the rank of vice-admiral in 1864), decorations (he received the highest honour his country could confer, the Grand-Croix de la L é gion d’Honneur , in 1880) and scholarly publications (numerous articles and at least thirty books and pamphlets). He continued to call on his considerable skills as a draughtsman, eg Souvenirs de Jerusalem (Paris 1862) is illustrated with lithographs after the author’s drawings and Souvenirs de Marine (Paris 1877-93) consists of seven folio atlases of plates showing different sea-going craft. He retired from active service in 1871 and devoted the remaining twenty-two years of his life to the Musée de la Marine, of which he was director. He died in Paris on 8 April 1893.

The fact that D’Urville’s account of the voyage of the Astrolabe incorrectly records Pâris’s given name as 'Edouard’ has led to some confusion with the genre and landscape painter Edouard Pâris, who exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1833 to 1839 and published an album of lithographic views of the Pyrenées in 1841.

Writers:
Collins, R. D. J.
Date written:
1992
Last updated:
2011