Woman of the Island of Guam, Antique Wahlen Costume Print, 1843-1844

An original antique wood engraving of a woman of the island of Guam, 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 “Femme de L'isle Guham (Océanie.)”, Guham being the nineteenth century French spelling of Guam. Guam is the largest of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific and the home of the Chamorro people. It had been under Spanish administration since the later seventeenth century, and its harbor served as a provisioning place for the galleon trade and for the European and American voyages of exploration that crossed the Pacific in the decades before this series appeared. Those voyage accounts are the kind of source from which Wahlen's compilers worked.

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 to collectors of Micronesia and of the Mariana Islands, a region far less often represented in nineteenth century costume prints than Polynesia, and it is a good example of how a Brussels publishing house assembled a picture of the Pacific from books rather than from observation. This ethnographic print frames well on its own and groups naturally with other Wahlen costume prints of Oceania in a set of four or six along a hallway or above a desk.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with minor edge chipping, soft corners and faint marginal soiling; the image itself is clean.

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