Warrior of Tonga Tabou, Antique Wahlen Costume Print, 1843-1844

An original antique wood engraving of a warrior of Tonga Tabou, 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 “Guerrier de Tonga Tabou”. Tonga Tabou is the nineteenth century European form of Tongatapu, the main island of Tonga in western Polynesia and the seat of its paramount line. The decades before this series appeared had been unsettled ones in the group, with rivalry between chiefly houses and a long period of internal conflict, and Tongan warriors were described at length in the European voyage literature and in the accounts of the missionaries who reached the islands in the same years.

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. Tongan subjects are less common in costume series of this date than Tahitian or Hawaiian ones, and the sheet is of interest both for the region and for what it records of European ideas about the Pacific in the eighteen forties. It suits a study, a library or a room with a Pacific theme, and this ethnographic print groups well with other Wahlen costume prints of Oceania, whether framed on its own or hung as a set of four or six.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with a frayed left edge, a small marginal spot and soft corners; the image itself is clean.

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