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'isle Massacre". Isle Massacre is a name that European navigators applied in more than one part of the Pacific after a violent encounter, and it has not been securely matched here to a single modern island, so the sheet is offered under the caption as printed. It belongs to the Oceania section of the work, where Wahlen's compilers worked through the Pacific island groups as the voyage literature had reported them. The name itself is part of what the sheet documents, since it records the European habit of labelling a place by what happened to the visitors there rather than by what its inhabitants called it.

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. The sheet is uncolored, as issued, and the wood engraving prints with the crisp line and even tone that suits a simple mount and a plain frame. Plates from this series group well, and a set of four or six drawn from the Oceania section hangs better together than a single sheet on its own.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light toning, faint marginal soiling and minor edge wear; the image itself is clean and strong.

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