Fifty-two drawings of animals observed in
Australia between 1801 and 1803 during
the voyage of HMS Investigator, under the
command of Captain Matthew Flinders...

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BAUER, FERDINAND LUCAS (1760 – 1826)

Fifty-two drawings of animals observed in Australia between 1801 and 1803 during the
voyage of HMS Investigator, under the command of Captain Matthew Flinders, and
drawn by Ferdinand Lucas Bauer, the expedition’s artist, after his return to England.
ca 1811-1813.

52 art originals; 46 watercolours and 6 pencil drawings on paper; 511 x 340 mm or
smaller. The 52 drawings contained in 6 boxes.

THE INVESTIGATOR VOYAGE.
When the British Government commissioned Matthew Flinders (1774-1814) in January
1801 to take command of the Investigator and undertake a survey of the Australian
coastline, it sent with him a party of scientists and artists to make natural history
observations of the places visited. The members of the party were chosen on the
advice of Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society and director of the Royal
Botanic Gardens, Kew. They included Robert Brown, a medical practitioner and
botanist, and Ferdinand Lucas Bauer, a Viennese artist who was to work under
Brown’s supervision.

Ferdinand Lucas Bauer was a son of the court painter to the Prince of Liechtenstein.
He was born in Feldsberg (now Valtice in the Czech Republic), but then a small town
north of Vienna, in Austria, on 20 January 1760. In around 1780 work took Bauer to
Vienna where he was employed as botanical artist to Baron Nicolaus von Jacquin, the
Professor of Botany and Chemistry at Vienna University. In Vienna Bauer met Dr
John Sibthorp, an English gentleman botanist and the Sherardian Professor of Botany
at the University of Oxford, in 1784. Sibthorp was on his way to Greece and the Levant
in search of the medicinal plants first described by Dioscorides in the first century
anno domini. Bauer joined Sibthorp on the expedition in 1786 and was employed to
draw and paint the plants, landscapes and animals seen on the way. In 1787 when
the expedition was over, Bauer was persuaded to accompany Sibthorp back to Oxford
taking the 1500 sketches he had made with him. There, from December 1787 until
1794, under Sibthorp’s direction, Bauer produced watercolours for the 966 plates in
Flora Graeca, (1806-1840), one of the botancial masterpieces of all time. Meanwhile,
as Ferdinand Bauer was employed at Oxford his elder brother, Franz Andreas Bauer
(1758-1840), an equally talented botanical artist, had joined the staff at Kew Gardens
in 1790 as botanical artist at an annual salary of £300. Franz Bauer remained working
at Kew for fifty years until his death in 1840.

Banks would have been well aware of the younger Ferdinand’s work at Oxford and,
from 1794, in London, and in 1801 Banks offered him the opportunity to travel to
Australia, an offer which he gladly accepted at a salary of 300 guineas per annum plus
expenses. The Investigator sailed from Spithead on 18 July 1801 and reached King
George Sound (in present-day Western Australia), on the south-western coast of
Australia, in December 1801. Between December 1801 and 1803 Bauer
circumnavigated Australia and visited Timor in 1803. At every landfall the civilian party
went ashore to explore the country and record their observations of the local wildlife.
These excursions were not without danger from venomous animals, the Aborigines
and other factors, and some crewmen lost their lives. By 1803 Flinders had
successfully completed his survey and was ready to return to England. Flinders was
concerned that the condition of the Investigator had become unseaworthy and it was
unsafe to attempt to sail home in it. He left the Colony on another boat intending to
bring a replacement for the Investigator on which to take the men back to England.
Meanwhile, Bauer stayed in New South Wales from June 1803-August 1804, and
visited Norfolk Island for eight months from August 1804 until March 1805. He then
returned to Sydney and joined the Investigator on 23 May 1805 for its homeward
journey. The voyage ended, four years after it commenced, on 13 October 1805
when the Investigator (Flinders mission to commission another boat had been
unsuccessful) docked at Liverpool and Flinders, Bauer and Brown stepped ashore.

Although there are only fifty-two drawings in this collection they are remarkable in
several ways. Most apparent is the beauty of the living animal Bauer has captured
with fidelity in these striking pictures. After seeing them eminent art historians have
unhesitatingly described Bauer as one of the world’s greatest natural history painters.
They are not just pretty pictures of colourful exotic animals either. Many of the
animals were unknown to Europeans before Bauer painted them and they are the
earliest scientific records of their discovery. In the absence of preserved specimens,
at least three of the paintings have served as the iconotype on which the first
published names and scientific descriptions are based. Potentially, some of the
others also could have been the basis for the first descriptions except that at the
beginning of the nineteenth century there were not enough knowledgeable people in
England to work on them. Over the next fifty years, as the British colony in Australia
prospered, more Europeans visited to explore and collect specimens for the great
European museums. Many of the same animals Bauer had seen and painted were
re-discovered, taken to Europe and, under more favourable conditions, eventually
named and described in scientific publications.

These paintings were not produced during the Investigator voyage but in a studio,
sometime after Bauer returned to England in 1805, probably around 1811-1813. The
reason is described in a letter Bauer wrote to his brother Franz dated 8 April 1803
when he was in Timor: “With regard to Natural History I have, since we left Port
Jackson [Sydney], made sketches of 500 species of plants but only 90 of animals,
mostly birds. I have not completed anything and will not be able to do so either. The
paper which I took with me on this cruise has gone mouldy because of the dampness
and warmth of the cabin and is covered with spots of mould and can no longer be
painted on or used for any kind of painting” (Norst:104). By the end of the voyage
Bauer had a total of over 2000 pencil sketches of animals and plants. He annotated
the sketches with numbers, the numbers corresponding to an elaborate colour code.
From the 303 zoological pencil sketches (Norst:68) and by reference to his colour
code Bauer produced the forty-six finished watercolour paintings and the six pencil
drawings in the collection, perhaps on a commission from the Admiralty which had
sent him to Australia. We can only guess that the date Bauer painted them was
around 1811 from the evidence of a watermark date “1811” which is present in some of
the drawing paper. The paintings are unsigned and there are no manuscript
annotations of any sort on them. The collection was in the possession of the Lords
Commissioners of the Admiralty until 1843 when it was presented to The Natural
History Museum, London. None of the zoological drawings was published in any
contemporary account. Flinders, who had just finished writing an account of the
Investigator expedition before he died in 1814 – A Voyage to Terra Australia, 1814
– did not include any of Bauer’s zoological drawings. It is only now, 200 years later,
that they have all been published for the first time, and in the original size, by Alecto
Historical Editions.

Bauer did, however, publish a small number of his Australian botanical paintings in a
book he began entitled Illustrationes Florae Novae Hollandiae (1813-17) but it proved
to be a personal and financial disaster for Bauer and he did not complete it. Greatly
disappointed, Bauer returned to Austria in 1814 taking the pencil sketches with him.
Most are now in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna. Bauer died in Austria in
1826.

Bauer Zoological Drawings - Accompanying Notes:
As none of Bauer’s zoological drawings are annotated the notes accompanying the
plates are compiled from the published work of several researchers who have
consulted Robert Brown’s Investigator diaries and manuscripts - as Bauer himself left
none.

The two most important sources from which this list was compiled are Alwyne
Wheeler and D.T. Moore, “The animal drawings of Ferdinand Bauer in the Natural
History Museum, London”, Archives of Natural History, vol. 21, 1994, pp. 309-344
(abbreviated W&M in the references) and Peter Watts, Jo Anne Pomfrett and David
Mabberley, An Exquisite Eye. The Australian Flora & Fauna Drawings 1801-1820 of
Ferdinand Bauer, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, Glebe, 1997
(abbreviated W,P&M in the references). However, because in some instances the
two sources have not used the same names it has been necessary to include, after
each heading, the source for the name, either W&M or W,P&M. The list also differs
from the list of drawings issued with the Alecto facsimile, Ferdinand Bauer’s Natural
History Drawings taken from the Zoological Specimens collected on the first
circumnavigation of Australia by Matthew Flinders, Commander HMS Investigator,
1801-1803. Alecto Historical Editions, in association with The Natural History
Museum, London, 1997. In compiling this list Australia’s Animals Discovered
by Peter Stanbury and Graeme Phipps, Pergamon, Rushcutter’s Bay, NSW, 1980,
was consulted – cited as S&P in the list. Also used were E. Troughton, Furred
Animals of Australia, 3rd edition, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1946 – cited as T in
the references, Axel Poignant, The Improbable Kangaroo and other Australian
Animals, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1965, Neville W. Cayley, What Bird is that?
5th edition, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1968, and Graham Pizzey, A Separate
Creation. Discovery of Wild Australia by Explorers and Naturalists, Croom Helm,
London and Dover, New Hampshire, 1985. The most complete life of Ferdinand
Bauer is Ferdinand Bauer. The Australian Natural History Drawings, by Marlene J.
Norst, British Museum of Natural History, London, 1989. Also recommended reading
is William Thomas Stearn’s book, The Australian Flower Paintings of Ferdinand
Bauer. Basilisk Press, London, 1976 and The Flora Graeca Story. Sibthorp, Bauer
and Hawkins in the Levant, by H. Walter Lack with David J. Mabberley, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1999.

In the accompanying notes, the present distribution of some birds and fish was
obtained from Charles G. Sibley & Burt L. Monroe, Jr Distribution and Taxonomy of
Birds of the World, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1990 and Alwyne
Wheeler, Fishes of the World. An Illustrated Dictionary. Ferndale Editions, London,
1975.

The size of the paper is given for each drawing, taken from the reference cited in the
heading unless stated otherwise. In all cases the measurements (in millimetres) are
height x breadth