Topographical Pictures including Selections from the Kelton Collection

The Topographical Pictures sale is led by three Tahitian paintings by William Hodges from Cook’s Second Voyage - two of these were painted on the voyage itself and are the first eye-witness accounts of this fabled Polynesian island by a professional artist. They are the field studies for Hodges’s two great Tahitian canvases exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1776, which prompted a craze for all things South Seas that ran through England and Europe in the last quarter of the 18th century. The sale will also include a fine selection of 18th and 19th century paintings relating to the Americas (led by Palliere and Sheridan’s rediscovered Argentine masterpiece depicting a caravan of gauchos on the Pampas), Africa (Dodd’s fine 1786 Table Bay marine), Asia (fine China Trade School views of Singapore and Hong Kong and a selection of Indian landscapes and portraits), and Australasia (Richard Read’s 1824 portrait of a Maori Chief).