Il canguro della Nuova Olanda

No European artist had ever painted an Australian animal before this. In 1770, on James Cook's first Pacific voyage, the young naturalist Joseph Banks brought back the skin of a strange leaping creature from the east coast of what was then called New Holland. In London he handed the problem to George Stubbs, the finest animal painter in Britain, but Stubbs had no living kangaroo to look at. He worked from the skin, blown up and packed out to suggest a living shape, from Banks's spoken descriptions, and from pencil sketches made on the voyage by the young artist Sydney Parkinson, who had died on the way home. So the animal here is a reconstruction, part observation and part guess, set against a plain, English-looking hillside. When Stubbs showed it in London in 1773 it was, for almost everyone who saw it, the first idea they had ever had of what a kangaroo was.