Joaquina et sa mere au Sermon du Pere PONS. Rota: Marianes

Jacoulet first visited the Mariana Islands in 1929 and returned several times through the 1930s, producing a series documenting Chamorro and Carolinian peoples under Japanese mandate. This sheet depicts Joaquina and her mother attending a sermon by Father Pons on Rota, capturing the Catholic devotional life that survived from the Spanish colonial era despite successive German and Japanese rule. The composition likely centers two figures in church dress — Chamorro women historically wore the mestiza, a Spanish-influenced gown adapted to tropical materials. Jacoulet's South Seas prints depend on his particular color sense: deep ultramarines and rose madders set against the warm browns of skin tones, often with mica or pearl-dust applied to lend interior shadows a perceptible glow. The double-portrait format he favored for paired figures allowed him to record generational difference in expression and bearing. His attention to specific named individuals — rather than anonymous ethnic types — distinguishes his Pacific work from earlier European images of the region, treating sitters as people with biographies rather than as illustrations of a culture.