Sketch 11. Leafy sea dragon (mistitled, actually Weedy seadragon, Phyllopteryx taeniolatus
This painting done by William Buelow Gould is one out of his work Sketchbook of Fishes, done in 1832. What was most interesting was the circumstances of the artwork, produced while Gould was incarcerated at a penal colony at Macquarie Harbour, Tasmania for forging a bank note. Despite his life of crime, Gould was important as one of the first artists to document the fauna at the colony.
Source: Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, Tasmanian Archive and Heritage Office.
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This remarkable book by the Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan tells the story of a 19th-century forger and thief who was sentenced to 49 years in the notorious prison on Tasmania's Sarah Island, and who was ordered by the prison doctor to paint the varieties of local fish as part of a scientific survey. The fish Gould so obsessively paints -- in 12 different colors, 12 different moods -- become representative figures of the people he encounters on his travels, as well as symbolic renderings of his own most deeply held dreams and fears.
Yet the novel, which was inspired by a series of fish paintings made by a 19th-century convict and forger named William Buelow Gould, is not simply an imagined account of its hero's picaresque life. It is also a wondrous, phantasmagorical meditation on art and history and nature; a surreal examination of the parlous consequences of British colonialism and the ambivalent legacy of the French Enlightenment; a fantastic tale involving killer pigs, talking heads and Kublai Khan-esque palaces rising from the South Pacific sands. It is a novel that weds the cacophonous digressions and philosophical asides of ''Tristram Shandy'' to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez; a novel that welds a Joycean love of language to a billowing, Melvillian vision of the world.
by Michiko Kakutani, NY Times | Read more:
