Malay People of Oceania, Antique Wahlen Costume Print, 1843-1844

Malay people of Oceania, 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 "Malais (Océanie.)", the Malays, placed by the publisher within his Oceania section. The term was used broadly in the 1840s, as Wahlen and his sources used it, for the peoples of the Malay peninsula, Sumatra, Borneo and the wider Indonesian archipelago, and it carried as much about European habits of classification as it did about the communities themselves. That is part of what gives this costume print its value to anyone interested in how nineteenth century Europe sorted and pictured the peoples of the world. 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 Malay subject is a good anchor for a group drawn from the same series, and a set of four or six island plates hung together makes a more considered display than one sheet on its own.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light toning, a small marginal chip at the right edge and a rounded corner; the image itself is clean and strong.

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