Carib Priests Instilling Courage: A Ritual Dance of the Caribbean, 1722

Name: Carib Priests Instilling Courage: A Ritual Dance of the Caribbean, 1722
Brand: American Maps and Prints
SKU: BG-13806-73
Price: 360 USD
Availability: InStock

$360

€320 · dollar price at today's exchange rate

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Shipping to the United States: $51 standard, $73 express, insured and tracked.

Date: 1722
Kind: Views & Engravings
Size: 40 × 26 cm (15.7 × 10.2 in)
Condition: Good. General age related toning and occasional light staining from handling as visible on image. Paper edges occasionally frayed and chipped from handling, not nearly effecting image. Strong paper.
Period: Colonial America
Places: The West Indies
Reference: BG-13806-73

What the condition grades mean

Excellent: Bright and clean, with no faults worth mentioning.
Very good: Only light signs of age, such as faint toning.
Good: Normal signs of age for a sheet of this period: toning, some foxing, small marks or neat old repairs.
Fair: Clear faults such as staining, tears or repairs, priced to match.

Every fault we see is written in the condition note, and the whole sheet is shown uncropped in the photos.

Guaranteed original. This is an original of the period stated, not a later reproduction or print-on-demand copy. If it is ever shown to be otherwise, we refund you in full.

Shipping to the United States. Sent from our gallery in Langweer, the Netherlands, flat between boards or rolled in a tube, and fully insured. Delivery and import charges.

About this piece

Carib priests blowing courage into a ring of dancers, an original hand-colored copperplate engraving after Bernard Picart from his illustrated work on the religious ceremonies and customs of the world's peoples, dated 1722 in the listing. The plate is numbered "95" at the top and titled below the image "Manière dont les Prêtres Caribes soufflent le Courage".

The scene is set inside a large, dim hall with a vaulted, ribbed ceiling and bare walls, with a bright arched doorway at the back opening onto palm trees and a hillside landscape. A ring of nearly naked men dances across the sunlit floor, each wearing a colored sash and a round red or pink ornament at the hip, bending forward in a stamping step. At the center, two men in green mantles and feather crests stand with long tubes in their hands, and white clouds of smoke puff from the tubes and around the dancers, who bend to receive it. Further dancers circle in the background with their faces turned away.

The Caribs of the Lesser Antilles were among the first American peoples met by Europeans, and Picart's plates, composed in Amsterdam from travelers' accounts, show such rites as eighteenth-century readers imagined them.

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