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

An original antique wood engraving of a young girl of Pitcairn 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 Pitcairn”. Pitcairn is a small and remote island in the eastern Pacific, settled in 1790 by the mutineers of the Bounty and their Tahitian companions. The community they founded remained unknown to the outside world for years, and once it had been found its story was retold throughout Europe and America, which is why a population of a few dozen people earned a plate of its own in a survey of the peoples of the world.

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 Pitcairn plate is one of the most readily appreciated in the series, since the island carries a story that needs no explanation, and it appeals to collectors of the Bounty and of Pacific voyages as much as to collectors of costume. The sheet suits a study, a library or a room with a maritime theme, and this ethnographic print groups well with other Wahlen costume prints of Oceania, including the Tahitian subjects from the same volumes.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with chipped edges and faint marginal soiling; the image itself is clean and well printed.

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