Dufour's Pacific Panorama at Home
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2017-02-01T06:20:39-08:00
Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique offers a technicolor, 10-meter-length, armchair circumnavigation of an idyllic Pacific by a centrally positioned, all-seeing state-side viewer in the American parlor. The lush Pacific scenes were produced in 20 continuous panels by the firm Joseph Dufour et Cie, in 1805. Dufour worked in conjunction with a Lyonese artist, who had traveled to the Caribbean but never the Pacific. Viewers in the papered room regale in scenes from New Zealand, the Marquesas Islands, Tonga, Easter Island, Tahiti, Hawaii (also called the Sandwich Isles) and the northwest coast of America. Les Sauvages was exhibited in 1806 at a Parisian exposition of Arts and Industry, and the enterprising Dufour promoted the paper in a 48-page brochure detailing each scene.[14]
Serving as a key to the panorama, the educational brochure was intended by Dufour to hold an equal place in his customer’s papered rooms as the images themselves. Picture and text come together to form a particular representational narrative. Dufour was an admirer of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and he tried to educate viewers in the nobility of the “savages,” drawing on established classical motifs of a pastoral ideal. In panel 5, dancing Tahitian girls recall the Three Graces, Greek goddesses of charm, beauty and creativity. Women are not only beautiful, they are athletic, “swimming and diving with astonishing athleticism and grace,” capable of ruling alongside men, recalling the feminist principles of gender equality of the French Revolution. In Nootka and Tonga, Dufour instructs viewers to note, “women are not that different in shape and dress from the men.” In the Society Islands, Dufour points out that men and women eat together, and “Their life is surrounded by sensual pleasures: they only partake of exquisite food and drink,” and, hinting at the voyeuristic opportunity afforded by his wallpaper, he adds, “their dances…are very lascivious.” The sensual landscape of chinoiserie has been replaced by the racy imagination of the ethnographer.
Dufour opens his brochure informing viewers that the composition was inspired by Captain Cook, de la Pérouse, and other explorers. Yet Dufour goes out of his way to minimize the conflicts characteristic of European imperial voyages. The well-known slaying of Cook by Hawaiians had been a very popular subject for European artists and illustrators since the news broke in 1780. It was included lest the scenes lose their credibility as true and accurate depictions, but it is a barely visible point on a landscape of statuesque hunters in a richly fertile setting heavy with life not death. Off in the far distance of panel 8, obscured by a large Hawaiian double canoe on a calm sea, we see Cook’s two vessels, the Resolution and the Discovery. In what Dufour calls a “sad event occasioned by a misunderstanding,” Cook’s killing becomes a neoclassical affair of heroic death, and Cook “a celebrated hero whose memory should be dear to all men.” Far from foretelling the two centuries of transpacific depredation and colonization yet to come, this violent interaction is reduced in scale not to spoil a Pacific characterized by luxuriant ever-giving wealth and harmony.
Wallpaper historians estimate that over a hundred sets of Les sauvages de la mer Pacific sold in federal USA, and there are several still in situ today. Dufour noted in his brochure, “a studious man reading the history of the voyages or the specific accounts of the explorers…might think himself, by casting his eyes around him, in the presence of the depicted people."[15] The appetite for Asian commodities had swelled to a yearning for actual face-to-face encounters with Asian peoples in Asian settings, but as seen in Dufour’s Pacific scenes, decidedly on European terms, placing Pacific exploration within a rose-colored neoclassical framework of republican virtue and equality. The competition, conflict, violence, and exploitation accompanying the European and American onslaught into the Pacific are entirely absent in the tableau and its text.
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[14] Butler, Roger, Vivian Webb, et al, “Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacific in England, America, and Australia,” in Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacific, Susan Hall, ed., Art Gallery of New South Wales and National Gallery of Australia, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.
[15] Joseph Dufour, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique: Tableau pour la decoration en papier peint, Macon: Moiroux, 1805.
