The Roman Fish of the Cape of Good Hope

One side of this sheet features a graphite drawing of a red roman fish (Chrysoblephus laticeps) with some watercolour around the eye. It is inscribed beneath the image, ‘The Roman Fish of the Cape of Good Hope’. The tail of the fish is cut off by the edge of the sheet, suggesting that the drawing may have been extracted from a sketchbook. This drawing is the work of naval officer Aiskew Paffard Hollis (1764–1844). It was probably produced in the period between 1796 and 1798, when Hollis was serving at the Cape of Good Hope, initially in the ‘Chichester’ and later in the ‘Tremendous’. The other side of the sheet features some roughly sketched coastal profiles. For other examples of Hollis’s work, see PAH4885 and ZBB0352–84.