[ALBUM D'AQUARELLES ORIGINALES] Souvenir du Tonkin. Suite de 49 aquarelles représentant, pour la plupart, des scènes de la vie rurale au Tonkin

No publisher, no place, no date [1885–1890]. Quarto (32.5 × 23 cm), 1 blank leaf and 49 unnumbered leaves. Contemporary half red percaline over corners, smooth spine covered in red shagreen, pebble-grain paper-covered boards, blue paper endpapers.

An exceptional collection of 49 original unsigned watercolours, each measuring approximately 20 × 15 cm within the margins, finely executed in Indian ink and watercolour with gouache highlights, mounted on guards. Several leaves bear the watermark "Latune et Cie Blacons", that of a paper mill in the Drôme region active throughout the final third of the nineteenth century. Rubbing to the spine, a few marginal spots of foxing. Accompanied by a strip of tawny calf (4 × 32 cm) inscribed in manuscript: "Souvenir du Tonkin 1885-90".

The iconographic programme offers a remarkable panorama of rural Tonkinese society at the dawn of the French protectorate. It encompasses guard posts and Tonkinese riflemen wearing the traditional salacco, agricultural scenes - ploughing, rice transplanting and harvesting-, weaving, the transport of produce, fishing, religious and funerary ceremonies, scenes of justice - including corporal punishment and executions - as well as a variety of leisure pursuits, among them cockfighting, wrestling, hunting, and groups of musicians. Western presence appears only once, in the form of a steamship glimpsed in the background of a riverside scene, a discreet indication of a colonial authority still in its infancy.

The album belongs to the years immediately following the Treaties of Huế (1883 and 1884) and the Treaty of Tientsin of 9 June 1885, which established the French protectorate over Tonkin. The Tonkinese rifleman who opens the series belongs to a corps only recently created, while the many scenes devoted to the daily activities, occupations, and customs of the local population reveal a genuine documentary purpose. Through their precision and close observation of everyday life, these watercolours anticipate, on a more modest scale, the vast ethnographic survey that Henri Oger would undertake in Hanoi some twenty years later for his Technique du peuple annamite.

Remarkable both for its scope and its coherence, this collection constitutes an exceptional visual record of Tonkin during the earliest years of the French protectorate, predating by several decades the major ethnographic surveys of the early twentieth century.