ET IN ARCADIA EGO
TB Macaulay, the 19th century poet, historian and politician, described a future where a ‘New Zealander’ (i.e. a Maori), a visitor from an Arcadian paradise, would witness London in ruins. In 1840 he wrote of imagining the melancholy day when “some traveller from New Zealand shall in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.” Gustave Doré made an engraving called The New Zealander in 1873, which appears to illustrate Macaulay’s vision. The ‘wizard-like’ figure, the New Zealander in his cloak, holds a sketchbook, and is drawing the ruins of St Paul’s. This seems an intriguing inversion of the tradition of death in paradise, a convention expressed in 19th century images of explorers in the New World, where images of death - skulls, coffins, and such - are shown amidst the untrammelled Arcadian landscapes.
