Young Girl of Madison Island, Antique Wahlen Costume Print, 1843-1844

An original antique wood engraving of a young girl of Madison 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 “Jeune fille de L'ile Madisson”. Madison Island was the American name applied in the early nineteenth century to the island the French called Noukahiwa, now Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, so the two names are probably to be treated as referring to the same place, though the identification rests on the usage of the period rather than on anything printed here. The Marquesas were among the last of the larger Polynesian groups to be regularly visited by Europeans, and France annexed them in 1842, the year before these volumes began to appear.

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 Polynesia and of the Marquesas, and the doubling of names on the charts of the period is itself part of what makes the sheet worth having. It suits a study or a room with a Pacific theme, and this ethnographic print is an obvious companion to the Noukahiwa plate from the same volumes, or to a group of four or six Wahlen costume prints of Oceania hung together.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with a frayed left edge, a small corner chip and faint marginal soiling; the image itself is clean.

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