L’ile de Chypre - Vues diverses, d’apres l’Album de M. Amedee Damour. - Types et Moeurs, d’apres les croquis de M. d’Orcet

Claude Sosthene Grasset came to Cyprus in 1860 where he married Aimee Laffon, daughter of Bernard Laffon, a doctor in the French army who retired in Nicosia. While in Cyprus, and after 1868 in France, Grasset wrote articles and published his own sketches in various French magazines. In 1869, the French community on the island appealed to Emperor Napoleon III to take possession of Cyprus and liberate it from the Turks. It is in this spirit that Grasset produced most of his work. This engraving features a total of eleven images. The ones appearing in the middle are purely ethnographic in content. Although they depict the familiar scene of harvesting grapes, they are quite unrealistic in their ethnographic detail. The one on the right shows a man wearing a French hat and a vest which is foreign to the island. In the one on the left, Grasset transplants the statue-like classical figure of a woman carrying an amphora on her shoulder. The image in the middle depicts the rather elaborate scene of a Greek wedding in Salamis, a town reputed for its Greek heritage. A couple of musicians playing the Greek lute and the violin appear on the right. A Greek Orthodox priest surrounded by locals is placed further back on the left. Just in front of the local crowd, a man stands proudly in mainland Greek costume. The dancing girls occupy central stage in the entire engraving. These are Gypsy women who used to travel to the island from neighbouring countries to work during the harvest. They are dancing in a lively oriental manner which differs markedly from the somber and modest style of female folk dances on the island. On such occasions, the Gypsy girls were invited to dance in the trickle of pennies as local women did not dance in public. In fact, no local female figure appears amongst the participants. This scene like those of harvesting grapes, are infused with idealism, giving a somewhat sanitized pastoral flavour to the artist’s views of Cyprus. The incorporation of French, Greek and classical elements served to make the images more culturally meaningful and familiar to a French eye. Moreover, it accentuated the historic link between Cyprus, once a French kingdom, and France and strengthened the appeal to redeem the island from the oriental yoke. The rest of the eight landscape scenes are reprinted here from sketches done by Amadee D’ Amour, a German artist in 1853 for the same magazine. They include a view of Saint Hilarion Castle, of the Hala Sultan Tekke at the Salt Lake in Larnaca, of the towns of Larnaca, Famagusta and Nicosia from a distance, of mount Olympus, Paphos castle at the harbour and a view of Cape Greco, with an ancient observation post or fort.