‘Voyages of Discovery’ and Their Troubling Artworks

Works by artists during so-called “voyages of discovery,” conducted globally by England, France, and Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, created lasting—and troubling—theories of race and beauty.

In a lecture entitled “Louis Choris’s Portrait(s) of Kamehameha I and the Dynamics of Art, Race, and Global Trade,” Prof. Kailani Polzak specifically focused on artist Louis Choris’s depictions of Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiians) made while traveling on the Russian vessel Rurik between 1815 and 1816.

Polzak, an assistant Professor in the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, demonstrated the role art history has played in articulating inequality and the construction of racial difference in a talk on Sept. 24 at Yale’s Loria Center.

The voyage—and the artwork made as a result of such trips—“undermined what we today would call the sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous peoples,” said Polzak.

Her current book project, “Difference Over Distance: Visualizing Contact between Europe and Oceania,” examines the graphic and printed works created in relation to the “voyages of discovery” during that period.

Polzak analyzed how aspects of these artworks, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, created misrepresentations of leaders and communities in Oceania that spread around the globe. She also demonstrated how these images were mobilized in arguments about the origins of human difference in Europe and the United States.

Polzak pointed out that while an 1822 book by Choris, who was hired as the voyage artist for a circumnavigatory, Russian-sponsored expedition on the Rurik from 1815 to 1818, is generally conventional, “his chapter on Hawaiʻi stands out for its unusual focus on a particular individual: the Hawaiian king Kamehameha, a monarch reigning over seven islands, who sat for a portrait by the artist.”

But contemporary analyses of the artworks—particularly those concerning the Kamehameha images—uncover a multitude of meanings and misrepresentations.

“In many ways, Choris’s chapter on Hawaiʻi, with its moments of idiosyncrasy, make manifest things we intuitively know,” said Polzak. “Nineteenth-century ethnographic and racialist theories are less coherent the more we look at them, and are always complicated by interplays of class and gender.”

Polzak also showed how images from the original sitting were duplicated and changed over time. The formal portrait, which is still referenced to this day, inspired many later depictions that spread globally.

“The case of Choris and Kamehameha challenges our assumptions about the dissemination of information about ‘foreign’ peoples and the primacy of print, because watercolor sketches and oil paintings circulating through mercantile networks dramatically outpace the print published in accounts of the Russian voyage,” Polzak said.

Polzak is an art historian whose approach to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe stems from the mutually determining histories of visual culture and empire, including the visual constructions of race and geography in the Pacific. Her research focuses on European visual culture during that period, with particular attention to histories of science, aesthetic philosophy, race, colonialism, and intercultural contact in Oceania.

By contextualizing this depiction of Kamehameha and the other images, Polzak said, “we can gain a deeper understanding of the significance of Hawaiʻi in nineteen19th-century global trade networks, the investment of European monarchies and empires in the persona of Kamehameha I, and the interplay between class and gender in constructions of race.”

Polzak received her BA in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at the University of California Santa Cruz and her PhD in the History of Art Department at University of California Berkeley. She is descended from great-grandparents who left the Philippines to follow American agribusiness to Hawaiʻi. She has spent most of her life living on Miwok, Ohlone, and Mohican homelands.

— FRANK RIZZO