Abstract
‘Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifique’, produced in Mâcon between September 1804 and September 1805, is a 20-panel wallpaper based on eighteenth-century voyages of exploration to the Pacific. The largest panoramic wallpaper of its time, and a product of French neoclassical culture, it depicts the ‘noble savages’ of the Pacific in utopian surroundings. Once installed on parlour walls, it recreated for its observer—within a papered room—an exotic world that owed at least as much to the imaginations of Europeans as it did to its professed subjects. Tellingly, the wallpaper cast the observer at the centre of this macrocosm, leaving its Pacific subjects on the periphery.
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Lythberg, B. (2016). A Pacific Macrocosm: ‘Les Sauvages de la mer Pacifique’. In: Craciun, A., Schaffer, S. (eds) The Material Cultures of Enlightenment Arts and Sciences. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44379-3_26
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-44579-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44379-3
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