Charles-Alexandre Lesueur and Nicolas-Martin Petit arrived at Sydney Town in mid-winter 1802, the first French artists to visit Britain's colony at Port Jackson. Two seasons lay ahead of them, providing respite after a gruelling exploration of Australia's south coast, and, more importantly, providing the young men with an invaluable opportunity. Lesueur and Petit were members of the Baudin expedition, which — prepared by the Institut National and sponsored by the First Consul at the close of the French Revolution — was the first scientific expedition to carry official anthropological instructions. It was thus with the varied advice of philosophers, humanists and comparative anatomists that Baudin's artists entered upon their most prolonged cross-cultural encounter of the voyage and, still more importantly, upon their only opportunity to observe Aboriginal Australians experiencing colonisation. The outcomes of this encounter were significant: Lesueur and Petit produced a rich body of portraits, ethnographic landscapes and settlement scenes depicting the Aboriginal people of Port Jackson. A number of these illustrations were published in the Voyage de découvertes, Atlas Historique, in 1807, and more again in the second edition of the volume in 1824. Intended to feed studies of human nature in France, these visual records also represent how Petit and Lesueur viewed the humanity of Port Jackson's Aborigines and intimate how they felt about the matter of colonisation.

It has long been clear that the way these artists looked at Aboriginal people in the Colony led to depictions that are exceptional in the context of early colonial art. Most earlier paintings and drawings of local Aboriginal people had been produced by ex-convict Thomas Watling and the ‘Port Jackson Painter’. They convey little about Aboriginal life and any hint of the artists' empathy for their subjects is less evident than the sense of the Aborigines' alterity. The French depictions reflect a more open and penetrating view. Bernard Smith highlights Lesueur's ‘typical’ rather than picturesque or neoclassical form of landscape art as well as the great degree of detail his scenes provide about Aboriginal life; Rhys Jones declares that Petit's is one of the best series of portraits produced of Aboriginal people; and Ian MacLean describes the drawings overall as ‘sympathetic studies … which showed a proud, dignified and stoic people’. The dissimilarities between the roles and circumstances of the voyager-artists and ex-convicts explain these differences to a degree; however, …