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pelago. Mr. Faverger Bourgeois sic brought these objects to Europe and gave them to his town’s museum 108 in 1841. Although these objects are well over a century old, they most often show no signs of use, which tends to indicate that they were manufactured to suit the Peruvian captain’s needs. Although more recent, the Krajewski Collection, which constitutes the second group of Neuchâtel’s Marquesan holdings, includes a number of older and well-patinated objects. The wealthy Pole visited Oceania aboard his own yacht before the First World War. The pieces he brought back, mainly from the Marquesas Islands, were fi rst shown as a private collection in 1914 in Neuchâtel, concurrent with an ethnology congress. The collection was then acquired by the museum, and in 1916 and 1917 it traded certain duplicates with Basel, Geneva, and Zurich (O’Reilly 1946: 121–122). Seventy years after O’Reilly’s brief visit to Neuchâtel, we know that the above-cited history requires some rectifi cation and also deserves to be reconsidered to explain more fully how this material was gathered and partially dispersed. According to records, there are 225 objects from several islands in the Marquesas Archipelago in this group. Although this may seem like a rational number for a researcher to manage, taking stock of these objects has not been a simple task because of the age of the entries and the fact that they were mixed together with other objects, so their identifi cation was often lost. This, combined with the limited amount of ethnographic information that the entries include (or indeed its complete absence) and the errors that are typical of the period, ensured that this would not be an easy task. It should be noted that record keeping at the museum began late, as did the attendant notes for each specifi c object. Things were in a state of disorder owing to the repeated transfer of the collection, and its elements often being moved from one display to another. It was not until Théodore Delachaux3 (1879–1949) became curator in 1921 that real inventory work began, but by that time a great deal of the identifying documentation had been lost or had become illegible. Considerable confusion arose, and multiple successive attempts to reconstitute data often did nothing more than compound the issue. Our fi rst task was to reunite and study all of the remaining documentation, but the archival sources were fragmentary, insuffi cient, and jumbled and often didn’t correspond to the objects to which they ostensibly pertained. An additional obstacle to the research was the fact that much of the ink in the volumes of correspondence had faded or otherwise had been made illegible by time. The Favarger Collection The list of the “museum’s new acquisitions”4 in 1840–1841 mentions “a large and valuable shipment from Frédéric Favarger, residing in Valparaiso, consisting of two bundles of weapons and instruments from the savages of the South Seas and a crate containing 239 birds, including several pairs of condors, as well as of other cases containing polyps, shells, etc.” (Mémoires 1846: 7). These “instruments from the savages” were some sixty-eight ethnographic items identifi ed by fi fty-eight entry numbers on an inventory sheet called “Gifts made to the Musée Ethnographique de Neuchâtel,” which is now in the Médaillier du Musée d’Art et d’Histoire (Reg. M.A.H. folio 194, Packet 93). The origins of the objects are vague, inasmuch as they are most often identifi ed only as being from “the South Seas” and the descriptions are often so cursory as to make it impossible to recognize the objects they refer to. Moreover, not all of the pieces have been identifi ed, and some could have been lost or mixed in with those from other sources. Any sense of aesthetic appreciation for the pieces was, at the time, nonexistent. For example, a Marquesan canoe mooring post (inv. V.185, fi g. 5) is described as: (#11). Brown idol on a post, or the extremity of a canoe; it holds one hand to its chin, the other in front of itself. Horrible fi gure, South Seas.” While a substantial part of the ethnographica in the Favarger Collection comes from the Marquesas Islands, other objects come not from “Otahiti” as the records might indicate, but rather from the Cook Islands, Kiribati, the Tubuai Islands (Austral Islands), and Easter Island (inv. V.213 and 214).5 Some fi fty years after the donation was made, curator Frédéric de Bosset identifi ed twenty-eight of about fi fty-fi ve objects as Marquesan, but was unable to account for the entire collection. An obituary notice by Dr. Maurice de Tribolet (Bulletin 1880: 175 sqq.), completed and corrected by state archives,6 furnishes the following information about the donor: Frédéric Favarger, the son of the late Samuel and Sophie Henriette Simond,7 and the grandson of Abraham de la Brévine FIG. 4: Votive fi shhook. Marquesas Islands. Wood, fi ber. L: 14.2 cm. MEN V.184 (Favarger Collection). Photo © A. Germond, Neuchâtel. FIG. 5 (top right): Canoe mooring post, tiki vaka. Marquesas Islands. 19th century or earlier. Wood. L: 66 cm. MEN V.185 (Favarger Collection). Photo © A. Germond, Neuchâtel. FIG. 6 (lower right): Paul Gauguin, Et l’or de leur corps. 1901. Musée d’Orsay, Paris @ RMN. FEATURE


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