ABSTRACT
Augustus Earle had been to places rarely or never before visited by European artists, notably New Zealand and Tristan da Cunha, then called The Inaccessible. This chapter considers Earle’s unconventional and most unusual inclusion of himself, as a primary subject in a significant number of his travel pictures, either through exclusion or marginalization, of the executive artist from that which he or she had otherwise represented. To set Earle up as a subversive anti-imperial hero would be to romanticize and misrepresent him. Paintings of Earle’s, such as his Distant View of the Bay of Islands, have also been characterized as examples of a dominating, colonizing eye, as panoptic panoramas. The chapter examines just a small selection of specific paintings by Earle - that Earle who was one of the few travelling artists who broke the rules by recurrently including himself in the picture as part of the scene or event depicted and as a central participant in the story.
