(1751-1793), Landscape painter, was an English artist best known for his images of early Alaska and Hawaii. Webber was born on October 6, 1751 in London, educated in Switzerland and studied painting at Paris[2]. Webber served as official artist on Captain James Cook??s third voyage of discovery around the Pacific (1776-1780) aboard HMS Resolution. At Adventure Bay in January 1777 he did drawings of "A Man of Van Diemen's Land" and "A Woman of Van Diemen's Land". He also did many drawings of scenes in New Zealand and the South Sea islands. On this voyage, during which Cook lost his life in a fight in Hawaii, Webber became the first European artist to make contact with Hawaii, then called the Sandwich Islands. He made numerous watercolor landscapes of the islands of Kauai and Hawaii, and also portrayed many of the Hawaiian people. Back in England in 1780 Webber exhibited around 50 works at Royal Academy exhibitions between 1784 and 1792, and was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1785 and R.A. in 1791. Most of his work were landscapes. Sometimes figures were included as in "A Party from H.M.S. Resolution shooting sea horses", which was shown at the academy in 1784, and his "The Death of Captain Cook" became well known through an engraving of it. Another version of this picture is in the William Dixson gallery at Sydney. Webber died in London in 1793.   Related Paintings of John Webber :. | Portrait of Poedooa | The Tahitian Princess Poedua, the daughter of Orio, Chief of Raiatea | Portrait of Poedua | A Party from the Resolution shooting Sea-Horses | A Chief of the Sandwich Islands |
Related Artists:
Neeffs, Peter the Elder
Flemish, Approx. 1578-1661
ASAM, Egid Quirin
German Baroque Era Sculptor, 1692-1750 Sculptor, stuccoist, painter and architect, son of Hans Georg Asam. After working with his father, he was apprenticed to Anton Faistenberger in Munich to learn sculpture. He presumably accompanied his brother Cosmas Damian Asam to Rome (1711-13), where he studied works by Bernini. In 1724 he became a valet and court stuccoist to the Prince-Bishop of Freising and in 1730 a valet to the Elector of Bavaria.
Samuel Butler
British author , (1835 - 1902) Samuel Butler was born on Dec. 4, 1835, in Langar, near Bingham, Nottinghamshire, the son of the local vicar. In a time of common paternal absolutism, his childhood seems to have been bleak and graceless. After taking a degree at Cambridge, he came into open conflict with his father over the question of his future profession, and at last he emigrated to New Zealand to become a sheep farmer. But though free of his father, he was not free of revolt, and the spirit of resentful rebelliousness marked much of his later life. In New Zealand he read Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and wrote a series of newspaper articles setting forth Darwin's ideas and ingeniously applying the evolutionary hypothesis to machines. Having made a modest fortune, he returned to England in 1864. Erewhon (1872), Butler's first book, is a mixture of satire, utopian theories, and serious speculation masked as whimsy. Set in the frame of a trip to an unknown land (Erewhon is an anagram of "no-where"), it has no real plot but is rather a description and discussion of the customs and institutions of Erewhon. In this land moral failings are treated as mental illness and cured by a "straightener," but physical illness and misfortune are considered crimes and severely punished. Children sign certificates absolving their parents of responsibility for their birth, and education is carried on in the College of Unreason. Butler's reflections on orthodox religion, begun in New Zealand, issued in The Fair Haven (1873), an ironic attempt to reconcile the New Testament with rationalistic criticism. In Life and Habit he returned to the question of evolution. In Evolution Old and New (1879), Unconscious Memory (1880), and Luck, or Cunning? (1887), he developed his ideas with an increasingly self-righteous resentment of what he conceived to be the Darwinians' deliberate concealment of the truth. Butler hoped to be able to restore will, intelligence, and design to a universe apparently made meaningless by the blind process of natural selection. The novel The Way of All Flesh, Butler's most famous work, was written between 1872 and 1885. It is the supposed biography of Ernest Pontifex, narrated by an older friend with an unrelenting candor deliberately affronting conventional pieties.