New Zealand-born artist, Marian Maguire, creates lithographic series that combine the colonial history of New Zealand with imagery from Greek vase painting. She brings together the rich print and photographic iconography of Europe’s encounter with New Zealand with the classical imagery of Ancient Greece to comment on the timeless and yet culturally nuanced nature of empire and conflict.

The addition of black vase iconography serves to emphasise the loaded history that Europeans brought with them to the Pacific to meet an equally ancient Maori culture. The weaving of mythic classical heroes like Odysseus and Heracles into narratives of European exploration highlights the changing nature of received histories. Just as classical myths changed through oral traditions, perceptions of the Pacific changed in Europe as different accounts and images were brought back.

In her series The Odyssey of Captain Cook, Maguire combines the story of British explorer Captain James Cook with Homer’s mythic tale of Odysseus. Bookended by classical urns that show Cook’s arrival and death, a series of ten prints show Cook’s encounters in New Zealand. Each is either observed or participated in by Greek black-vase figures. Maguire quotes directly from images produced on and after Cook’s voyages, many of which are in the NMM collections.

This ninth lithograph in the series adapts the famous painted portrait of James Cook by Nathaniel Dance in the NMM collections (BHC2628). She comments on Cook's legacy left in the Pacific, while also bringing representations of the Pacific back to Europe. Cook sits to the right in his Captain's dress uniform, pointing to his chart of the South Pacific on the table. Maguire has expanded Dance's portrait to include a classical urn placed on the table which shows Hercules and a Maori warrior fighting over a pig. Pigs were introduced to New Zealand by the British and became known as 'Captain Cookers'. They have already appeared on the base of the urn in plate I. Hercules appears as the protagonist of another series by Maguire in the NMM collections 'The Labours of Herakles' (ZBA7691-ZBA7702). The title of the print appears in a scroll to the bottom left of the image.