107 grotesque, demonic, and quite emotional. They would have resonated with the audience of the time and would have been easily accepted as truth in relation to the common perception of the exotic and the unknown. From the late eighteenth through the debut of the twentieth century, naturalism and authenticity were the priorities as discovery, classification, and the analysis of material culture necessitated precise imagery in scientific documents. Depictions of native arts were made to illustrate craft and workmanship, such as Sarah Stone’s many drawings of Cook Voyage artifacts, or to show the degenerate spiritual nature of their creators in relation to the moral superiority that was in all things Christian. The artist who drew the Reverend John Williams surveying the fallen idols of Rarotonga laying at his feet on a ship’s deck (fig. 2) needed no further visual metaphors to portray the power of the English king’s faith. While the style of artistic expression changed with fashion, from visions of Apollonian Arcadia to the rigid taxonomy espoused by Darwinian anthropologists, the purpose was basically the same. Artificial curiosities became native curiosities, which became scientific specimens (fig. 5). In the first decade of the twentieth century, a group of artists and intellectuals began to relate to non-Western art in a wholly transformative manner. Instead of artifacts examined solely for instruction in the understanding of FIG. 2: Henry Anelay, The Rev. John Williams on Board Ship with Native Implements, in the South Sea Islands, c. 1838. Watercolor. 42.5 x 33.5 cm. Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia, Canberra, NK187. human development and society, they took on an intrinsic visual value in their own right. The discourse between the artifact and viewer altered, with the artifact now touching upon the creative inner soul, mirroring that which this group of artists were beginning to find in themselves and within their own visions. Freedom of expression, of spirituality, and of sexuality were all found deeply imbedded in the primal nature of these arts, and the first decade of the century brought a realization that all art was indeed kindred. However, not all non-Western art held equal attraction. This was as much by historical happenstance as by temperament. Objects from the Bismarck Archipelago— which incorporates the island groups of New Ireland, New Britain, and the Admiralty Islands, among others—found their way into Western museums as early as the 1830s. Collections in England were formed by the administrator Hugh Romilly and the missionary George Brown, and in Australia by the trader Thomas Farrell, but it really was not until the German colonial administration of the islands that interest in the artifacts from this region began to have an impact on a wider Europe consciousness. Beginning with the activities of the Godeffroy and Hernsheim trading houses in the early 1870s and through to the outbreak of WWI in 1914, the collecting and dissemination of Bismarck artworks to Germany progressed at an almost industrial level. Administrators, merchants, FIG. 3: Isaac Gilsemans, Tabar Islands Canoe, 1643. Engraving.
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