APS-OPS-Ch13-Lafont

Chapter 13
The Visual Terms of Cultural Encounters:
Petit and Cuvier’s Australian Experiment
Anne Lafont
Preprint from Of Pictures & Specimens: Natural History
in Post-Revolutionary and Restoration France
Edited by Sue Ann Prince
Forthcoming Spring 2013
The American Philosophical Society gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the
Richard Lounsbery Foundation toward the symposium, this preprint release, and the
publication of the book.
Proceedings of a symposium held at the APS on December 1–3, 2011, in conjunction
with the exhibition Of Elephants & Roses: Encounters with French Natural History,
1790–1830
Exhibition presented at the APS Museum, March 25–December 31, 2011
Preprint downloaded from http://www.apsmuseum.org/symposium/
Note: This preprint is for personal, non-commercial use only. Due to copyright
restrictions, it does not include images.
Copyright © 2012, 2013 by the American Philosophical Society for its Memoirs series.
All rights reserved.
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Memoirs
of the
American Philosophical Society
Held at Philadelphia
for Promoting Useful Knowledge
Volume 267

Preprint for Of Pictures and Specimens: Natural History in Post-Revolutionary and Restoration France, edited by Sue Ann
Prince. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 267. Forthcoming Spring 2013.
Copyright © 2012, 2013 by the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. All rights reserved.
13
The Visual Terms of Cultural Encounters: Petit and Cuvier’s Australian Experiment
Anne Lafont
This symposium on French natural history at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the
nineteenth century is a special occasion to return to an altogether exceptional group of drawings:
the immense collection (nearly eight thousand drawings and manuscripts) of naturalist and artist
Charles Alexandre Lesueur, held at the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle in Le Havre. The collection
includes a set of drawings by Nicolas Martin Petit, a little-known student of famed painter
Jacques Louis David. Petit participated in Captain Nicolas Baudin’s expedition to Australia
(1800–1804), during which he was charged with portraying Aboriginals.
Since my first work in this collection in 2005 and the partial publication of my research
in a 2010 article,1 two fascinating exhibitions have highlighted this gold mine for the researcher
and enthusiast interested in these curiosities and documents—drawings that had artistic value and
scientific merit for the brand-new anthropological ambitions of the Idéologue moment of post-
revolutionary France.2 A 2009 exhibition dedicated to Lesueur related the exceptional life of this
explorer-artist, originally from Le Havre in Normandy, who traveled to Australia and the United
States. I have chosen, however, to concentrate on Petit’s production in relation to the Australian
expedition, especially since this material has been partly published thanks to another exhibition,
L’Autre: Les Naturels vus par l’Occident (1800–1804),3 mounted in 2008.
Relying on these publications, which restore the documentary aspects of this scientific
enterprise, I will briefly summarize the most important elements in order to understand the issues
at stake in this body of images for a present-day art historian who investigates how the
perception, representation, and restitution of the Other is mediated in various ways; and
especially important, how the recipients of the “portraits”—whether politicians, anthropologists,
or dilettante consumers of illustrated travel accounts—also have agency in mediating the image
of the Other because of their own time-bound potential interpretive stance.
I will attempt to show that this Australian adventure of 1800, when viewed in the light of
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s work on images in scientific atlases, was undoubtedly one
of the definitive stages in a passage from a scientific community that demanded documents
faithful to nature (the visual regime of “truth-to-nature” in Daston and Galison’s book on the
history of objectivity) to a scientific community in search of visual productions that could be
used to establish scientific proof. Even if such proofs were not “objective” (it seems that
subjectivity was not even imaginable at that time), they were at least theorized and systematized,
before becoming mechanized in the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks to the advent of
photography. This scientific system, which inaugurated new theoretical and practical procedures
for collecting visual testimony, was codified to a point where agreed-upon principles could be
established and repeated under the same conditions and in all circumstances. Consequently, the
graphic production coming out of this new mode of operation, nurtured comparison—the
foundation of modern science as Cuvier had envisioned it.

Lafont Visual Terms of Cultural Encounters
3
In other words, the insistence with which this brief Australian experiment inserted itself,
through the voices of its actors, into a system of new scientific procedures, reveals how scientists
disqualified the “truth-to-nature” image, regardless of the modes used previously (synthetic,
generic, or specific), in favor of an image that could become a material object both constitutive
of and exploitable by science.
I will thus study how the demands of the supporters of a new science affected the form
and the outcome of naturalist drawing at the beginning of the nineteenth century and revealed
that what these images provided was not necessarily what the explorers actually saw. It is also
essential to understand what mediation these drawings and engravings embodied, all the more so
because the chosen body of works, still almost unknown, serves to represent remarkably well the
epistemological inquiries raised by the status of the image in natural science around 1800. It will
be also an opportunity to consider, in a more general manner, the contribution of the tools of art
history to the history of science, including natural history.
The first French anthropological society, the Société des observateurs de l’homme, was
founded in Paris in 1799. It was modeled after the concepts of the Idéologues, who were
numerous among its founding members. In fact, sensing the failure of the naturalist approach to
the global comprehension of humanity—and still more the difficulty of precisely defining the
Aboriginal—they attempted to understand humans simultaneously as social beings and as
anatomical specimens. At the same time, Nicolas Baudin, an explorer enthusiastic about the
natural sciences, imagined a round-the-world voyage. He submitted his project to the Institut de
France, which decided to support this initiative but confined its ambition, restricting him to the
exploration of Australia, then poorly known. In March of 1800, Bonaparte set the project in
motion. The same year on October 19, Baudin’s flotilla of two ships, Le Géographe and Le
Naturaliste, set sail from Le Havre carrying sailors, artists including Lesueur and Petit, and
scientists such as zoologist François Péron, a student of Cuvier and a partisan of the brand-new
science of anthropology.
As Claude Blanckaert has reminded us in many works, there was no real rupture between
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century representations of native peoples. The encyclopedic era of the
naturalist Buffon and the philosopher Rousseau could not rid itself of a difficult paradox:
Aboriginals represented a golden age of pre-civilization, before the corruption of customs
observable in European cities.4 Philosopher and theorist of education Joseph-Marie Gérando,
member of the Société des observateurs de l’homme, echoed this idea at the very end of the
century, writing that “the philosophical traveler who navigates towards the extremities of the
earth in fact goes through the course of the ages; he travels in the past and crosses a century with
each step.”5
Taking account of this fantasy, it is difficult to imagine that the same intellectuals had
succeeded in reconciling this image with contemporary ideas that men of science had defended
from Buffon to Jules-Joseph Virey. They had argued that “savages”—the term of the time—
belonged more to the animal kingdom, because of their cruelty, sloth, and lack of participation in

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4
a teleological project activated by ambitions of progress, conquest, and ascension, whether
economic, territorial, commercial, or technical.
The first years of the nineteenth century saw the apogee of this conflicted vision of new
worlds. Among the challenges facing the first anthropological society was the obvious necessity
of resolving this antagonism by applying rational and objective methods to the observation of
“natural man.” It was to be a science established on the collection of reliable sources, modeled
on textual and visual testimonies, formalized by contract a priori.
In his introduction for “Considérations sur les diverses méthodes à suivre dans
l’observation des peuples sauvages,” Gérando specified that his instructions were “addressed to
Captain Baudin, correspondent of the society, ready to depart on his expedition of discovery, and
to the observers who accompany him; they are also addressed to citizen Levaillant, who will
undertake a third voyage to the center of Africa.”6
This proves the programmatic and conceptual character of this address, which seeks to be
an abstract method, ready to be developed in all circumstances of encounter, exploration, and
anthropological observation. If the procedures were well conceptualized at the start, they would
be the means of an empirical investigation whose rigorous and strict methods would guarantee its
instructive effectiveness. Gérando continued: “As it is possible that all and sundry had occasion
to encounter peoples who belong to very different degrees of civilization or barbarism, one has
believed it necessary to foresee all hypotheses, and to generalize these considerations to such an
extent that they could apply to all nations that differ from European nations in their moral and
political forms.”7
In other words, the Société des observateurs de l’homme needed to combat mythologies
of the good savage, henceforth unsatisfactory following the many expeditions pursued in the
second part of the 18th century, from Bougainville to La Pérouse via the tragic and fatal
experiment of James Cook, who was assassinated during a battle with Hawaiian natives in
1779—proof of the violence arising in these allegedly paradisiacal regions. The Société
developed procedures likely to supply it with facts, and founded a new science authorizing (both
practically and morally) the discovery but soon also the conquest of these territories and their
natural resources, extremely valuable in the process of building colonial empires. François Peron
asserted this notion quite directly: “Would it not be glorious for the French nation to precede
these other peoples in this new and important course of action?”8
The apparent incapacity of these “savages” was organic according to some, climatic
according to others, or could be caused by both reasons combined, as Péron envisaged. Before
his departure, he had set out to “determine the physical nature of the climate, [and to] research
and define its influence on the organic constitution of the people that live in it, as well as [its
influence] on the development of their moral and intellectual faculties.”9 Therefore, by
supposedly proving the incapacity of these populations to deal with the finality of their own
individual lives and the destiny of their communities (that is, their perceived inability to think
differently than in the present mode of individual and collective choices), the philosophical
scientists or the anthropologists—as they called themselves—cleared the way for colonial

Lafont Visual Terms of Cultural Encounters
5
ambitions that continued until the late twentieth century. This first anthropological enterprise
(very brief, as the Société des observateurs de l’homme was dissolved in 1804), based on a
generally dual ideology, initiated the raciological science that animated the entire nineteenth
century, the same science that supported the construction of colonial empires and technological
conquests.
In this context, Lesueur and Petit embarked on their scientific expedition to Australia.
They were placed under the patronage of Baudin, but still more, for the nature of their work as
observers and draftsmen, under the supervision of Péron, passport and guarantor of the precepts
elaborated by Cuvier, one of the founding members of the Société. Cuvier was also the author of
a “Note instructive sur les recherches à faire relativement aux différences anatomiques des
diverses races d’homme.”10 Gérando developed similar ideas at length, notably regarding of
deaf-mutes. He edited the publication cited above titled “Considérations sur les diverses
méthodes à suivre dans l’observation des peuples sauvages.”11 These two texts, both written in
1799, testify to the new methods that members of the Société attempted to perfect and to their
expectations, also completely new. The philosophical scientists came willingly from diverse
disciplinary origins (medicine, zoology, climatology, visual arts, geography, etc.), but all became
anthropologists joined in this intellectual and experimental adventure, resting most of their hopes
on the visual production to come after the voyage.
Cuvier was the prescriber most engaged in drafting instructions essential to effectively
carrying out the collecting of images, even though Gérando was not indifferent to the methods of
art, even recalling that its vocation was to imitate nature, the equivalent of the scientific project
they had inaugurated.12
The latter, in a memoir much more complete than Cuvier’s on the missions of the
expedition, showed on one hand a marked interest for the social being, his language, his beliefs,
his institutions, his modes of transmission; and on the other, an interest in the circumstantial
modalities of investigation (learning the language of the Other or developing a language of
gestural signs likely to support communication, adapting to the habits of the “Savages” to gain
their confidence, and so forth).
Before entering into the details of Cuvier’s meticulous recommendations, it is important
to understand that the dominant prejudice of his work or his expectations— presupposing that he
shared these with his time (for instance, see Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, author of a
contemporary treaty on physical and moral man from 180213)—came from his belief in a perfect
correspondence between “the perfection of the spirit and the beauty of the face.”14 In other
words, according to Cuvier, not only is physical man in close relation with moral man; the
morality of an individual can therefore be a gauge of his physical nature. But even more, he
introduced an aesthetic dimension: the physical configuration of the Caucasian is normative,
because it is a guarantor of the morality of the population to which it is closest, and the moral
perfection of an individual can be estimated by the beauty of his face. Consequently, the
observation of Aboriginals occurred through prisms. Initially, they were judged for the