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Secondary sourcePainting1772

The Kongouro from New Holland

George Stubbs · 1772

George Stubbs's 1772 painting of a kangaroo, made from a skin collected during Cook's first voyage, giving Europe its first image of the animal.

This kangaroo painting was made possible by a skin collected during Cook's first voyage, which he commanded.

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Painting of a pale kangaroo standing upright on a rock in a hazy landscape with hills and a dramatic sky with pink-tinged clouds. The animal looks to the left with its tail extended down over the rock.
George Stubbs, The Kongouro from New Holland, 1772. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

About this source

What it is

This 1772 oil painting by George Stubbs depicts a kangaroo. It was commissioned by Joseph Banks and based on the inflated skin of an animal he collected on the east coast of Australia in 1770 during James Cook's first voyage, along with a drawing by Sydney Parkinson. It is held by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

Why it matters

This is considered the first painting of an Australian animal in Western art. It shows how Cook's voyage brought entirely new knowledge of the natural world to Europe, and how artists worked from secondhand evidence—an inflated skin and a sketch—rather than a living animal, shaping how Europeans first imagined Australian wildlife.

Look closer

  • Why might the kangaroo in the painting look slightly unusual compared to a real one?
  • What does it mean that Stubbs never saw a live kangaroo before painting this?
  • How did paintings like this shape European ideas about places and animals they had never visited?

This painting is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of James Cook on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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