Can you take too many photographs of something? In the summer of 2006 I attended a three-day course in Greenwich and took the opportunity to take some photos of the Captain Cook statue at the nearby National Maritime Museum (NMM). In all I took some 200 photos of the statue from every possible angles; some early in the morning, some at midday and some in the evening. The sun shone and lit the statue at different angles throughout the day.

Here is a selection of the photos I took.     

This bronze statue by Anthony Stones was originally modelled as one of a set of seven Pacific explorers for the circular "Hall of Discovery" in the New Zealand pavilion at the Seville Expo of 1992.¹ There are two bronze metal versions of Cook, that at the NMM and another at Gisborne, New Zealand.² The NMM version was presented by (Sir) Arthur Weller, CBE in 1994 and first erected on a classical-pattern composite plinth south of the west colonnade in 1996.³ Partly because English Heritage had only agreed this location as a temporary one, and because the original plinth proved visually unsatisfactory, the statue was relocated in 2003 to its new position inside the NMM gate to the Park looking up the Jubilee Avenue toward the Royal Observatory. The statue now sits on a solid Portland stone plinth.

Ian Boreham

References

1. Cook's Log, page 839, vol. 15, no. 2 (1992)
2. Cook's Log, page 1183, vol. 13, no. 3 (1995)
3. Cook's Log, page 1270, vol. 19, no. 2 (1996)

Originally published in Cook's Log, page 12, volume 31, number 2 (2008).