Tahitian Venuses by Lucien Gauthier: 1

Fetia

As we are going through another minor heatwave here at present we thought it would be appropriate to return to the South Seas for one of our regular looks at Polynesian lovelies.

All of these ladies originate from Tahiti and their pictures were taken by a French photographer, Lucien Gauthier in the early years of the twentieth century.

Lucien Gauthier in his studio

Tahiti became a French protectorate in 1842 and the French government had a small garrison there. The first photographers in Tahiti were, therefore, French naval personnel.  A number of French officers took photographs which were sent to Paris for reproduction in magazines such as Tout du Monde and L'Illustration to pander to the thirst for views of these exotic islands.

Aote

By the 1860s there were regular visists by ships to Tahiti and it became possible for photographers to establish on the island.  These photographers would take pictures of views of the island and the exotic inhabitants to be sold in albums.

Manu

The voyage from the US to Tahiti had to be made by schooner and would take several months, limiting accessibility and the number of settleres that came to the island.

Schooner in Papeete Bay

In 1901, however, the Oceanic Steamship Company of San Francisco launched a regular (once every 36 days) service to Papeete.  Leaving San Francisco at 11.00 am  on the steamship Mariposa under the command of Captain Rennie, the voyage would now take only 12 or 13 days, remaining at Papeete for four days before returning to San Francisco.  Although the ship could accomodate 75 passengers it rarely took more than 25 making it a relaxing voyage, according to travellers at the time.

SS Mariposa docked at Papeete in 1907

It was on the Mariposa that French photographer Lucien Gauthier arrived in Tahiti in 1904.  Gauthier was born in 1875 but left France at the age of 27 to work in the French American Bank in San Francisco.  A friend told him that the only photographic studio had just closed on the island and he set off for Papeete forthwith.

Gauthier's studio at rue des Ramparts, Papeete

He rented a house in the rue des Ramparts and set up his studio there.  He had bought a simple camera in San Francisco but had to learn his trade as photographer as he went. He put up a simple case outside his house and put examples of his photographs inside it (see above) which acted as his only advertisement.

Tatabiate

At this time there were about 700 Europeans living in Papeete and people started to come to his makeshift studio and have their portraits taken.   His sitters weren't just local government officials but also some distuinguished locals as well.

Tatabiate

Gauthier, like many others before him, became particularly enamoured of the beauty of the local girls and started to photograph them as well.

Craeg

In this post we have put together a selection of his studio shots, many taken against a painted backdrop of a Tahitian landscape.  Later he would shoot his ladies on location and we will look at them another time.

Nehenehe

Gauthier only spent two years in Tahiti as he was required to return home to France to complete his military service.   He returned to San Franciso on the Mariposa arriving shortly after the 1906 earthquake which meant that he had to sleep outside on the ground on his arrival.

Tamo

Gauthier had little difficulty encouraging the local girls to pose for him for his tasteful art nudes for, despite the activities of Catholic missionaries who had made the girls cover up, memories of a culture that did not see nudity as shameful remained strong enough.  Gauthier himself recording that, on one of his expeditions to some of the wilder and more distant country, he ran into a completely naked vahine, much to his delight.

Terai demonstrating an aparima dance step

Gauthier's girls show less of the impact of Chinese and Indian blood coming to the island and so their apperance more closely mirrors the look of the girls who enticed the crews of Bougainville and Bligh over a hundered years earlier.

Gentil

More of these langorous lovelies another day.

South Seas Venus by Vargas

As it's the first of June today we thought we would post this nice Vargas Polynesian girl from the June page of Esquire's 1943 calendar. Originally it was accompanied by the following verse:

This June I would have married

but an ocean stepped between,

I hope no sultry so and so

has landed my marine.

Another expression of the fear expressed by American women of straying troops far away, given the notorious charms of South Seas island girls!

At this point she was still a Varga girl. The name only being changed to Vargas (his real name)when he acrimoniously split from Esquire, after a series of law suits, who asserted that they owned the copywright to the term Varga girl and his signature. As a result of this dispute Vargas spent much of the late forties and fifties in financial difficulties. He was rescued by Hugh Hefner who started to commision the renamed Vargas girls for Playboy in the sixties.

Hawaiian Venus by Al Moore

It was unseasonally cold this morning in Surrey's capital of bling. We actually had a frost and only two degrees! So, given that, it's probably time to have another South Seas lovely to warm us up!

This is one of my favourite Polynesian pin-ups, from Al Moore in 1949, very much riding the wave of the post-Pacific War love of island girls.

Al Moore, who died in 1991, was a very successful commercial artist who got really well known when he replaced Alberto Vargas as Esquire's pin up artist in 1946. Succesful pin-up and calendar work followed although he continued to do high profile work for clients like Hertz and Coca Cola.

Moore's girls were rather more realistically proportioned than some of his rivals and, as a result, have a nice girl next door quality.

For the 1951 Esquire calendar he returned to the Tiki theme with another couple of South Seas lovelies.

The fact there were two out of twelve images with a South Pacific theme shows how popular the Tiki fashion had become since the war.

Tahitian Venuses: from 1966

Waiting for a big boat full of Frenchmen?

We haven't had any Polynesian lovelies for a while so here is a small selection of girls from Tahiti dating back to 1966. There is very little, if anything, to suggest that these pictures were taken nearly forty-five years ago. Timeless!

She looks just like one of Gauguin's girls!

The flower behind the right ear means she's looking for a mate. Behind the left ear means she's taken (on the basis that the heart is more to the left side).

Prototypical Tahitian girl in excelsis

We wonder what's tired her out?

A smile from the islands

Polynesian Venuses

Further to our posting on our Adventures of Triple P website featuring the lovely, but slightly overdressed, Miss Tahiti, Hinatea Boosie, we feel that, as the snow starts to fall outside we can do with some more summery loveliness from the South Seas.

Much (if not all) of the image of Polynesian girls as smiling, beautiful, willing innocents living a life of uninhibited free love in their tropical paradise comes to us from the first European accounts of contacts with the islanders in the eighteenth century. The fact that many of these first contacts were made by the French mustn't be underestimated. Compared with British explorers the French writers uninhibited descriptions of the girls they found focus much more on the local girls' charms than their British equivalents.

Bougainville's frigate La Boudeuse

Many of these accounts originate from the voyage organised by Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville ( 1729-1811). In 1766 Louis XV granted Bougainville permission to attempt to be the first French explorer to circumnavigate the globe.

Bougainville's two ships anchored off Tahiti

Bougainville left Nantes on 15 November 1766 with two ships: the frigate La Boudeuse and l'Étoile (the storeship for the voyage which actually sailed a little later). They travelled to South America first and didn't get into the Pacific until over a year later on 26th January 1768. They didn't see land again until March 21st when they came across the small group of islands that make up Vahitahi. By the beginning of April they had arrived at what the French called Nouvelle-Cythere and the locals called Tahiti.

The Prince of Nassau has some cat trouble

Travelling with Bougainville was Charles Orthon, Prince de Nassau-Siegen who had had an exciting encounter with a jaguar during a stop in South America. An even more exciting encounter awaited him on Tahiti.

On April 7th 1768 Nassau he had the following experience:

"These Indians offered us women as being the objects they most cherished, undeniably these well deserved this distinction. They each in turn used all their charms to please us. Here is one example. I was strolling in a charming place, carpets of greenery, pleasant groves, the gentle murmur of streams inspired love in this delicious spot. I was caught there by the rain. I sheltered in a small house where I found six of the prettiest girls in the locality.

They welcomed me with all the gentleness this charming sex can display. Each one removed her clothing, an adornment which is bothersome for pleasure and, spreading all their charms, showed me in detail the gracefulness and contours of the most perfect bodies. They also removed my clothing. The whiteness of a European body delighted them. They hastened to see whether I was made like the locals and pleasure quickened this research. Many were the kisses, many the tender caresses I received! Throughout this scene, an Indian was playing a tender tune on his flute. A crowd of others had lined up around the house, solely preoccupied with the spectacle. We were living amidst this gentle nation like allies and friends. "

Bougainville meets the locals: "Forget the Ferrero-Rocher I'd rather have a brace of those fine Vahines!"

Other European ships found similar enticements but many of the British officers refused to be tempted (or else failed to write about it!). The same could not be said of the sailors, who were delighted to find these young girls being offered to them or have them swim out to their ships. These actions changed the nature of the islands and the lives of their women. Initially reports seem to indicate that girls were offered to the captains and officers by the elders as a sort of welcome gift (like a basket of fruit in your hotel, perhaps). The sailors wanted the same treatment and the locals realised that by using the girls to provide sexual favours they could elicit goods in return.

One of Bougainville's men, Charles-Félix-Pierre Fesche also wrote accounts of encounters with the local women. First he describes a girl being bought to the ship in an outrigger canoe as soon as they had anchored.

"She was tall and well-made. In her colour she was as white as any Spanish lady might wish. Many of our luxurious men, plainly destitute of provisions for such many months, were uncommonly longing. They came presently near, looked, admired and touched. Soon, the flimsy veil which concealed the lures from their eyes in honour of modesty which may perhaps be condemned, was torn away and more readily it is true to say by the Indian nymph goddess herself than by our men."

Later whilst exploring the local settlement a young girl tries to tempt the sailors to have sex. Most resist except for one bolder Frenchman who started to caress her:

"A much determined hand guided by love made its course towards two upright and burgeoning fruits as deserving as those of Helen’s of serving as models of the highest sort and this because of their incomparable shape and beauty of their form. By fortune’s gift, the hand then travelled onwards and fell upon hidden lures under the covering of a band of their cloth, which soon was removed by the girl herself who revealed herself to our eyes as naked as Eve before the fall."

Fesche later explains that the married women did not grant their favours, but that “those who are unmarried are free and prostitute themselves with whomever takes their fancy, and so one can appreciate the kind of life most of the French led in this fortunate island”. It was certainly the case that the women being offered to the sailors were very young and the older women did not behave in the same way towards the sailors.

Later, it turns out that the wily locals were bringing pretty girls on board to distract the sailors whilst they made off with interesting items from the ships.

After nine days on this paradise the French moved on to Samoa and what would become known as the New Hebrides. The expedition returned to France on March 16th 1769 and the accounts written of the voyage essentially created the reputation of Tahiti and Polynesia as a paradise of beauty, abundance and sensuality.

There was an interesting footnote to the voyage. The botanist Philibert Commerçon was with the expedition and his valet and assistant, Jean Baré had been helping him take samples whenever they made landfall. However when Baré landed on Tahiti he was immediately surrounded by locals who declared that he was a woman. Back on board Baré confessed that he was really Jeanne not Jean. She, therefore, went on to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. How the Tahitians could spot this immediately whilst a shipload of Frenchmen who had been cooped up for over a year with her did not is an interesting question.

Polynesian princess from one of Captain Cook's voyages

British crews were no less immune to the charms of the locals even if they were a little more circimspect in their descriptions as to what they got up to. Nevertheless, George Forster, who took part in Captain Cook's second voyage wrote in 1774:

"The simplicity of a dress which exposed to view a well-proportioned bosom, and delicate arms might also contirbute to fan their amorous fire; and the view of several of these nymphs swimming nimbly round the ship, such as nature had formed them, was perhaps more than sufficient to subvert the little reason that a mariner might have left to govern his passions."

The locals greet the HMS Bounty

Twenty years later it was Tahiti that the crew of HMS Bounty spent nine months on trying to cultivate breadfruit in an agricultual experiment designed to transplant the crop to the Caribbean.

Marlon Brando as Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) with Polynesian actress Tarita who became his long term girlfriend and the mother of his children

Shortly after leaving the island they munitied against Captain William Bligh (who had been Cook's sailing master) and many returned to their local women on Tahiti. Another group kidnapped local women and took them to Pitcairn Island where their descendents live to this day.

Mel Gibson in The Bounty (1984) enjoys a Tahitian welcome

The development of photography in the middle of the nineteenth century enabled these exotic creatures to be captured in all their finery such as this Samoan princess

.

The experiences of American troops returning home from the South Pacific after World War 2 helped contribute to an image of Polynesian women in the US not dissimilar to the way the British thought of Scandinavian girls during the 1960s:happily uninhibited about sex in a way the women at home just weren't.

In the 1950s and 1960s when Tiki Culture swept America even the mens magazines of the time took the opportunity to inject a bit of South Seas exoticism into their pages. It's no coincidence that the swimming pool at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago was done in Tiki style.

The flower behind the left ear indicates that the girl is available

Sexy Vahines from the Fifties

In truth, some of the ethnic background of many of these Tiki themed restaurants was a bit muddled. Here we see a South Sea Island beauty somehow mixed up with Caribbean zombies.

Ocean liner operators and airlines in the thirties, forties and fifties were well aware of the key attractions of Polynesia to their potential clients.

Even today half dressed, smiling, long-haired beauties feature disproportionately in tourist advertising. Tahiti being French half-naked girls in postcards are also popular!

A rather effective postcard from Tahiti



This pert specimen actually came off a tourism website

One of the strongest cultural images of Tahiti today is the ōteʻa dance often, these days, performed by lines of girls in grass skirts (or, more likely, synthetic ones) with the only musical accompaniment being drumming.

Latterly, South Seas dance contests have grown up across the Pacific and these tend to feature the girls in even more abbreviated fabric skirts.

It is a faster, more aggressive dance than the more stately Hawaiian Hula and features rapid hip movement contrasting with graceful arm movements. Just search for "Corrine" and "Tahitian dancing" on YouTube so see a Tahitian dancing champion in scintillating action...

So a big thank you to Polynesian girls; who have become semi-mythical creatures of sensuality, passion and beauty in a way that is unmatched throughout the world. There is no better antidote to a freezing winter day!