Young Malay Woman Carrying Water, Antique Wahlen Costume Print, 1843-1844

A young Malay woman carrying water, 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 "Jeune Malaise portant de L'eau (Océanie.)", a young Malay woman carrying water, placed by the publisher in his Oceania section. Wahlen used the term Malay broadly, as his sources did, for the peoples of the Malay peninsula and the islands of the Indonesian archipelago, and the series took an interest in everyday occupations as well as in the dress of rank. A water carrier is one of those working subjects, and it shows how the compilers set ordinary labor alongside courts and warriors. 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. Working subjects of this kind hang well in a kitchen or a garden room, and they group naturally with the other Malay and Javanese plates from the same series.

The sheet is in good condition for its age, with light toning and minor wear along the right edge; the image itself is clean and strong.

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