First edition of this suite of 22 original satirical lithographs inspired by the annexation of the Marquesas by Abel Aubert Dupetit-Thouars in 1842, and presenting the Marquesans faced with the problems and current living conditions of the French. The plates were subsequently incorporated into the newspaper Le Charivari between 1843 and 1844.

First edition of this suite of 22 original satirical lithographs inspired by the annexation of the Marquesas by Abel Aubert Dupetit-Thouars in 1842, and presenting the Marquesans faced with the problems and current living conditions of the French. The plates were subsequently incorporated into the newspaper Le Charivari between 1843 and 1844.

In 1840, the British consul in Tahiti, George Pritchard, left for England to ask for British protection for the islands, but was too late to prevent their annexation by France. The French presence in the Marquesas was slight, but it had a dire effect on the indigenous people and the islands suffered the greatest population decline of all the major island groups of the Pacific as a result of imported diseases, particularly smallpox, to which they had no acquired immunity. It was in this context that Édouard de Beaumont created this series of lithographs, a bruising commentary on the cultural clashes between the French colonizers and the indigenous people of the Marquesas Islands.

"The Marquesas, initially in the orbit of American influence, had just in 1842 become a definitively French possession following the expedition of Admiral Aubert du Petit-Thouars. Around this time, Prime Minister Guizot was considering how to establish a place for political deportations at this end of the world. Beaumont must have been unaware of this ambition, the twenty-two plates of the series showing rather an imaginary transposition of Parisian mores to the Antipodes. "Le Bon Sauvage" is confronted with Fashion, Taxes, reads the newspaper and goes hunting as in Sologne. They get together to play the violin, even belote, and men in funny hats dance "negrillons". Milliners, tax-collectors, gamekeepers and even the dandies of the Boulevards so ferociously sketched by Gustave Doré a little later, are exported to the islands. Under the pretext of transmitting civilization, this fierce satire of the mores of the time is softened by a certain happy indolence specific to the islands" (translated from online resource https://cartonnagesromantiques.blogspot.com/).

Only two copies are listed as having appeared at auction in modern times, both in the 1950s.