Warrior of the Island of Solor, Antique Wahlen Costume Print, 1843-1844

A warrior of the island of Solor, 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 "Guerrier de L'isle Solor", a warrior of the island of Solor. Solor lies at the eastern end of the Lesser Sunda chain, off the coast of Flores, and it had been contested ground since the sixteenth century, when a Portuguese fort was raised at Lohayong and later taken by the Dutch. By the 1840s the island sat in the uneasy zone between Dutch and Portuguese spheres in the eastern archipelago, which is one reason its people appear in a European survey of this kind. 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. Warrior subjects from the eastern islands group particularly well, and a set of four hung together, Solor beside Sawoe, Timor and Rotti, makes a coherent and unusual display.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light toning and small chips along the left edge, clear of the image, which is clean and strong.

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