painter, was born at Châteaudun in the Loire Valley, France, and showed artistic talent early. He abandoned a university course to study in the studio of a well-known historical painter, Coignet. From 1833 he moved around France painting landscapes in the manner of Claude and Huysmans and exhibiting the resulting works in the Salons of 1834 and 1835. In 1835, from the south of France, he went on a painting trip to Algeria, which whetted his appetite for travel to exotic places. In 1837 he successfully applied for the position of official artist on Dumont d’Urville’s expedition to the South Pole and Oceania with the French Navy corvettes Astrolabe and Zélée.
During 1838-39 Goupil’s cheerful and generous nature won him the affection of all members of the expedition. He filled many canvases with finely detailed and faithfully observed scenes of places as diverse as the bleak terrain of Patagonia, Antarctic storms, the tropical lushness of Tahiti and the East Indies, as well as the strange landscape of northern Australia. Then, along with many members of the two ships’ companies, Goupil was stricken with dysentery, contracted from infected waters taken on in Sumatra. After a long battle with this illness during the difficult two-month trip from Sumatra to Hobart Town, he died in Hobart Town on 1 January 1840, just as the corvettes were leaving for their second attempt to reach the high Antarctic latitudes and the subsequent discovery and claiming of Adelie Land for France.
He was mourned by all. His obituarist wrote: 'A few hours before his death, as the whim of a dying man, he asked for some champagne. We could not refuse his request and he was holding the glass in his feeble hand, when Commander Jacquinot who had a special affection for Ernest came to see him. “You see, Commander”, he said, trying to smile, “death is not so sad as people imagine”. At this saintly acceptance, that tough sailor, who had seen death in many forms without flinching, whose crew had been decimated by disease, turned away to hide his tears’. The young surgeon Louis Le Breton became the artist for the remainder of the expedition.
Goupil’s only known Australian works are to be found as lithographs in the second volume of the Atlas Pittoresque, published by Gide et Cie (Paris 1844) to accompany the ten volumes of narrative, Voyage au Pôle Sud. They include Natives of Raffles Bay and The English Settlement at Port Essington.
- Writers:
- Rosenman, Helen
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
