Design and Art Australia Online

painter and naval draughtsman, was an official draughtsman on the expedition commanded by d’Entrecasteaux which visited Australia three times during its voyage in search of La Pérouse. The scientific nature of this expedition was clearly established from the outset with the decision to appoint a team of five scholars and one artist to each of the two vessels. The artists were to work in close co-operation with the scientists and surveyors to record 'all the Coastal profiles and remarkable Landscapes, the Portraits of the Natives of the different countries, their costumes, ceremonies, games, buildings, sea-going Craft, and all the products of the Land and sea in all three realms’. Through the last days of August and the first week of September 1791, Piron, who was to sail in the Recherche , and Ely, appointed to the Esp érance , assembled their equipment and material for the voyage. Piron bought paper, paints (carmine, four different qualities of ultramarine and two boxes of colours), forty-two brushes, 120 English ' crayons ' (pencils or pastels?) in two different qualities, and various erasers. (Ely’s purchases were more varied, but he left the expedition at Cape Town at the beginning of 1792 and thus falls outside the immediate concern of this dictionary.)

The two ships visited Australia from 21 April to 28 May 1792 (Recherche Bay, Van Diemen’s Land), from November 1792 to January 1793 (the south-west coast of the continent with a brief stay at Esperance Bay) and between 21 January and 27 February 1793 (a return to Recherche Bay). As 1793 advanced disease and death, including that of d’Entrecasteaux, severely weakened the expedition; its precarious situation was compounded by political factors after arrival at Surabaya in Eastern Java (Indonesia) in October 1793. France and Holland were now at war and the information available suggested that the fledgling French Republic was seriously threatened. In February 1794 the new commander, d’Auribeau, chose to throw in his lot with the Royalist cause. He had the royal flag raised and republican sympathisers, Piron included, were arrested and handed over to the Dutch as prisoners of war. Piron entered the service of the Dutch governor of Surabaya. He died at Batavia in 1796.

His surviving drawings, which in their variety reflect his original instructions, contain a small but important corpus of Australian subjects. There are two landscapes and two drawings of black swans from Esperance Bay and, from Tasmania, two landscapes, seven fish, one portrait, two groups of Aborigines and two drawings of artefacts. This Australian collection is extended by the number of engravings after Piron: eleven plates in the Atlas published by Labillardière in 1799-1800, of which only five correspond in whole or in part to known drawings; twelve plates in Labillardière’s study of the plants of New Holland (1804); and five views of the Tasmanian coast grouped on one plate in the Atlas compiled by Beautemps-Beaupré (1807).

Nothing of substance has been discovered concerning Piron’s family (he had a sister who was still alive in 1817) or artistic training. He was evidently familiar with a range of conventional drawing techniques as his work displays a disconcerting diversity of styles. Pre-romantic seascapes, figure studies, portraits in a neo-classical mould and curiously elongated figures which recall sixteenth-century mannerism are all represented. As works of art, his coastal profiles are more successful than those of other draughtsmen on the expedition, although the surveyor Beautemps-Beaupré found cause for dissatisfaction: 'I began to take care with the coastal profiles after Amboina because during that port of call [September 1792] I acquired the certainty that the views taken by the Expedition’s Artist could be of no use for my work’. Nevertheless, Piron’s work found favour in the eyes of his commander and it was destined to know a distinguished future, generating many copies and adaptations in travel literature over the following half century.

Writers:

Collins, R. D. J.

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011