Imagining the Pacific : in the wake of the Cook voyages /Bernard Smith.

In this book Bernard Smith explores in more depth the issues first dealt with in his classic European Vision and the South Pacific. He continues his careful examination of how European artists and scientists travelling to the Pacific during the time of Cook's voyages were stimulated to see the world in new and creative ways. In analysing intensely personal responses to a newly accessible environment, Bernard Smith shows how science, topography and travel had an impact on current pictorial genres, how an empirical naturalism affected long-standing classical conventions, and how difficult it was for the artists to portray people and places they knew little about.