Un Homme de Yap, Ouest Carolines

This portrait depicts a man from Yap in the Western Caroline Islands, part of Jacoulet's Micronesian series produced after his travels through the Japanese South Pacific Mandate. Yapese men of the period wore elaborate body adornment that Jacoulet's carvers reproduced with documentary care — woven loincloths, betel-nut bags, shell ornaments, and the distinctive ear ornaments and tattoos that marked clan and status. The composition almost certainly presents a single figure in three-quarter or full pose, set against a stylized background that may include the iconic stone disks of Yapese rai currency or tropical foliage. Jacoulet's male Pacific portraits emphasized musculature and bearing in a manner foreign to traditional Japanese print conventions, drawing on his Western academic training in figure drawing. The skin tones required demanding work from printer Onodera Uichi, layering successive transparent washes to model the body in light. Such prints functioned simultaneously as portraits of named individuals, ethnographic records of vanishing material culture, and self-contained aesthetic objects — the triple ambition that defined Jacoulet's mature output.