Native of Massacre Island, Antique Wahlen Costume Print, 1843-1844

An original antique wood engraving of a native of Massacre Island, an ethnographic costume print 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 “Naturel de L'ile du Massacre”. Names of this kind were given by European navigators after a violent encounter between a ship's company and the people of a coast, and more than one island in the Pacific and in the Indian Ocean carried the name in the charts and voyage narratives of the period. The caption alone does not fix which of them Wahlen's compilers had in mind, so no identification is offered here, and the sheet is described by the name that is printed on it. It stands as a reminder of how much European naming in the Pacific recorded the encounter rather than the place.

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; 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. This impression is uncolored. The plate is of interest precisely because of that naming, and it is a plain example of the nineteenth century European habit of describing distant peoples through the experience of the ships that reached them. Sheets of this kind reward a little reading, and the subject suits a study or a library rather than a formal room. This ethnographic print groups well with other Wahlen costume prints of Oceania and of the wider Pacific in a set of four or six.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with a frayed right edge, small chips and a short marginal tear; the image itself is clean.

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