Le Kangourou de la Nouvelle Hollande. “Par M Petit – Ebauche”

Original pencil drawing by Nicolas-Martin Petit, an artist on Nicholas Baudin’s voyage of exploration to Australia in 1800-1804. Captioned on the reverse by the “geographer” (essentially the surveyor and cartographer) on the voyage, Charles-Pierre Boulanger, in his hand “Par M. Petit – Ebouche” (“By M Petit – sketch”). Despite being a talented artist, like many others coming into contact with kangaroos for the first time, Petit’s image is not very lifelike. Such images were not perfected until quite a few years later…

Baudin sailed from la Havre in October 1800 with a complement of twenty-two scientists, with a mission to explore the three-quarters of the coast of Australia not examined by James Cook and to study, record and recover specimens for the National Museum of Natural History. After the three official artists left the voyage at Mauritius, Nicolas-Martin Petit who joined the expedition originally as a gunner’s mater and Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, who had embarked as ‘private artist to the Commander’, were installed as official artists in their place. With Lesueur focused on the recording of landscape and species, the depiction of the people encountered fell largely to Petit, albeit this drawing of a kangaroo is by Petit, not Lesueur.

The expedition, ill-fated in many aspects, returned in 1804 without its commander who had died at Mauritius in 1803, but with an unexpected cargo of over one hundred thousand natural history specimens, 960 paintings or drawings by Lesueur, and Petit’s “large portfolio of drawings”. After surveying the western and southern coasts of the continent throughout the latter half of 1801, in early 1802 Baudin’s ships called at the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, Burney Island and Maria Island in Tasmania, and from June to November 1802 while in Sydney Petit completed portraits of people of the Cadigal, Dharawal, Gweagal, Kurringai and Darug language groups of the Sydney Harbour region.