Card of the Day - 2022-01-23

Anon Our Colonies
Anonymous [trade : O/S : France?] "Notre Domaine Colonial" / "Our Colonies" (????) Un/?

Our third clue was this super card of Tahiti and that ought to have given you the island in Desert Island Discs.  

Tahiti is also most people`s idea of the perfect desert island. It is in the South Pacific, and it is the largest island in French Polynesia, plus there is a large indigenous population. The big surprise though is that the sand there is not white, nor yellow, it is black, a souvenir of when the volcanoes there were in full flow.

It is often said to have been discovered by Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century, but this is only the first western explorer to reach the shores. The very first feet to touch the shore were from neighbouring islands, and from South East Asia, a very long time before, it is thought prior to 500 BC, and they arrived by canoe, the menfolk coming first and then the families and their livestock. It must have been an amazing journey, and would have involved repeated trips, to and from the same location, without the benefits of today`s SatNavs and computers.

However Tahiti`s real claim to fame came in the 1890s, when the French artist Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin moved there and immortalised the area in his works. He even married a local girl. However it was not the idyll he thought it would be, and though he would later send nine of the paintings to a Paris Art dealer, which were exhibited in Copenhagen, they did not meet with much acclaim from the gallery visitors, and few were sold.

I have simplified the English translation of the title of this set a bit, and also made it kinder, for "Domaine" actually means "lands under our control".  

As here, this card is often found anonymous, but the large space at the bottom of the reverse has a reason, and that is to be overprinted with a trade advertisement. As I find these I will add them in