ABSTRACT
Louis Delaporte – French captain, draughtsman and participant of the French Mekong Expedition of 1866-1868 – presented the twelfth-century sandstone temple of Angkor Wat in his 1880 book entitled Voyage au Cambodge: L’architecture Khmer. Two aspects of his drawings were remarkable: firstly, although the call for the reclamation and restoration of the decayed ninth-to-thirteenth-century temples of the Angkor region (until 1907 on Siamese territory!) was an essential part of the French colonial rhetoric in Indochina at this time, Delaporte depicted Angkor Wat in a picture-perfect condition (Delaporte 1880, 206-207) (Figure 1). Secondly, his drawing did not correspond to the French narrative of Angkor as the abandoned site of a vanished civilisation; on the contrary, he placed a row of four dancing and bare-breasted women with stylised skirts, necklaces and crown-like headgear on the temple’s central causeway as a perfect stage. He named them ‘tévadas’ or ‘celestial nymphs’, as they were ‘sculptured on the walls of Angkor-Vaht’ to represent the ‘living female beauties themselves’ (Delaporte 1880, 344-346). Delaporte’s ideal reconstitution of the temple as a stage setting and background for a re-imagined historical dance performance remained a powerful pictorial combination for the decades to come. During his second mission to Indochina (1873-1874), Delaporte collected original sculptures and made moulds of selected bas-reliefs of the Angkorian temples and shipped them back to France. His collection was finally opened in the mid-1880s as the musée Indo-chinois in the Parisian Trocadero palace, just opposite Viollet-le-Duc’s musée de Sculpture comparée containing plaster casts of mainly Gothic French architectural sculpture. At this point, the
Figure 1. Angkor-Vaht (Vue restituée), as depicted in Louis Delaporte’s 1880 publication Voyage au Cambodge (Delaporte 1880, 206-207).
