FEATURE In a photograph taken on the banks of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea in 1935 by Charles van den Broek, one of the members of the French La Korrigane expedition2 represents a vision for many Oceanic art collectors. A man dressed in white appears in the photo, standing on a riverbank with four Melanesian guides in front of an impressive collection of some twenty fi ve objects, including about ten large sculptures from the Yuat River area. This image has appeared in a number of publications, including in an article by Sally Price (Gradhiva 1988: 24; Peltier 1984: 115), as an indicator of how successful the expedition’s collecting efforts were. However, we know today that the efforts represented here were not those of a La Korrigane expedition member and that the man in white was not affi liated with La 104 Korrigane. Efforts to fi nd the pieces in the photograph in French collections have been in vain, although, according to Philippe Peltier, about twenty years ago art historian Douglas Newton identifi ed a number of the objects seen in this image. Comparison with other photographs in the archives of the Australian Museum allows identifi cation of the man in white, and the book Malaguna Road (Fortune 1998), which deals with the memoirs of Sarah Chinnery, the wife of Pearson Chinnery, the offi cial Australian government anthropologist in Rabaul, states that members of the La Korrigane expedition met with a certain plantation owner. Both of these trails lead to the same man: Ernest Wauchope. Armed with this information, ten objects visible in this photograph and collected by Wauchope have now been located. Ernest Wauchope and the Art of the Yuat River By Christian Coiffi er1 FIG. 1 (above): Ernest John Luther Wauchope on the bank of the Sepik River with a group of artworks probably collected by him. Photograph by Charles van den Broek, 1935. Reproduced by permission of the van den Broek d’Obrenan family. FIG. 2 (above right): Map of the Sepik River region. © Tribal Art magazine. FIG. 3 (right): The van den Broek photograph from fi g. 1 with reference numbers for the various artworks discussed in this article.
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