A Corroboree in Van Diemen's Land

The scene is a corroboree, a night gathering of song and dance, lit by the moon, with figures moving in the open bush of Van Diemen's Land, today's Tasmania. Glover painted it in 1840 on his farm in the north of the island, working from drawings he had made eight years earlier, and it is one of the last of his corroboree pictures. Its route to Paris shows how Europe first filed such an image. The French king bought it in 1845 as a curiosity. In 1933 it went to the colonial museum in Paris, the institution built to display France's empire, and only in 1968 did it enter the Louvre as a painting in its own right. The Louvre's French title still spells out what the buyers were meant to see, a dance of natives of Van Diemen's Land, Tasmania, Australia, by moonlight.