Female Dancer in Java, Antique Wahlen Costume Print, 1843-1844

A female dancer in Java, an original antique wood engraving from Auguste Wahlen's Moeurs, usages et costumes de tous les peuples du monde, published in Brussels between 1843 and 1844. The plate is lettered "Danseuse à Java", a dancer in Java. Court and village dance was one of the aspects of Javanese life that European travelers wrote about most often in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the dancers attached to the courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, along with the professional performers known in the sources as ronggeng, were described at length in the travel narratives on which Wahlen and his compilers drew. This costume print belongs to the Oceania section of the work, where the publisher placed the islands of the Indonesian archipelago. The sheet is a wood engraving on paper and is uncolored, as issued in this part of the series, and the crispness of the block work is what carries the image.

Moeurs, usages et costumes de tous les peuples du monde was published in Brussels by Auguste Wahlen at the Librairie Historique-Artistique between 1843 and 1844. The four volumes set out to describe the dress, customs, occupations and social divisions of the peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania, drawing on travel narratives, earlier costume books and other sources then treated as authoritative, and they carried approximately one hundred and ninety to two hundred plates, the count varying between copies and editions.

Wahlen was the publisher and compiler rather than the artist, and where a name such as Duverger, Pannemaker, Mercier, Lisbet, Markaert or Vermorcken appears on a sheet it belongs to the illustrator or the engraver, and no artist is attributed here without one.

The plates are wood engravings on paper. The images should be read as a nineteenth century European interpretation of the cultures they show rather than as a documentary record, which is a large part of what makes the series interesting to historians of the period. The Javanese dance subject sits naturally in a music room or a hallway, and it groups well with the other Java plates from the same series when hung as a set of four or six.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with only soft corners and light edge wear; the image itself is clean and crisp.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.