Please excuse me if my question is not very clear, but after attending an exposition about Paul Gauguin I wanted to know if other artists (painters, sculptors, writers...) travelled to the Pacific Ocean (including Australia/New Zealand) and how did they react to it?
I really enjoyed Gauguin's portraits of women from Tahiti and I would love to learn more about the imagery and "reception" of the Pacific Islands during the 19th century. Also, I just realized that I read Melville's Typee a few years ago and absolutely loved it. Thus I'm kind of looking into stuff like this. For instance I'd love to read notes of an artist's journal who travelled to this part of the globe.
A good place to start is the Honolulu Academy of Arts exhibition Encounters With Paradise: Views of Hawaii and Its People, 1778-1941, catalogue by David Forbes, 1992--there is remarkable work by all kinds of European and American artists you've never heard of.
An important figure is the American artist John La Farge, student of Thomas Couture, who visited and made paintings in the South Seas in the 1890s, including Tahiti, Samoa, Hawaii; he also travelled to Japan. Yale University Art Gallery has his South Seas sketchbook.