New Zealand-born artist, Marian Maguire, creates lithographic series that combine the colonial history of New Zealand with imagery from Greek vase painting. She brings together the rich print and photographic iconography of Europe’s encounter with New Zealand with the classical imagery of Ancient Greece to comment on the timeless and yet culturally nuanced nature of empire and conflict.

The addition of black vase iconography serves to emphasise the loaded history that Europeans brought with them to the Pacific to meet an equally ancient Maori culture. The weaving of mythic classical heroes like Odysseus and Heracles into narratives of European exploration highlights the changing nature of received histories. Just as classical myths changed through oral traditions, perceptions of the Pacific changed in Europe as different accounts and images were brought back.

In her series The Odyssey of Captain Cook, Maguire combines the story of British explorer Captain James Cook with Homer’s mythic tale of Odysseus. Bookended by classical urns that show Cook’s arrival and death, a series of ten prints show Cook’s encounters in New Zealand. Each is either observed or participated in by Greek black-vase figures. Maguire quotes directly from images produced on and after Cook’s voyages, many of which are in the NMM collections.

This tenth lithograph in the series shows the scene of Cook's death on Hawaii in black-vase imagery on a classical urn. It thus fulfills the scenes anticipated in the urn that introduces events in the series. This image of Cook's death shows him being stabbed in the back by a Hawaiian while raising his hand to his ships off shore. The composition is taken from John Webber's version of the scene (such as PAF4641), while this specific version comes from a design by Hamilton, engraved by Thornton for Charles Middleton's 'New and Improved System of Geography' published in 1777. On the neck of the urn, two vignettes show ships entering and leaving the Pacific. On entering the ship prominently flies the British flag, on returning it is battered and broken, but tows a large urn filled, Maguire suggests, with the spoils of exploration. The title of the print appears as a label on the plinth below.