South Sea Islanders 1826 - 1861

Auguste Edouart made this silhouette titled 'South Sea Islanders' sometime in the first half of the 19th century. This work offers insight into how cultures outside of Europe were being portrayed at the time. Edouart was French, but spent many years in England and Scotland, and later in America, where he made the bulk of his silhouettes. Though Edouart's work usually focused on portraits of the middle classes, here, the work presents an exotic scene of the pacific islands. It's important to remember the cultural and political context here. European colonial expansion was well underway in the 19th century, so these images would have carried specific connotations relating to British Imperial power and the anthropological gaze that came with it. The composition romanticizes and perhaps sensationalizes the islanders, portraying them with specific visual codes that would have played into the imagination of a Western audience. To understand the full implications of images like these, historians look to a wide range of resources, including colonial archives, travel literature, and the history of museums and exhibitions.