Another French recording-artist of that period was Charles Giraud, who set out for the South Seas on a store-ship "La Recherche" in April 1842 and in fact became the Protectorate's official painter more than four years later.

Giraud returned from Tahiti with hundreds of pencil drawings, enhanced with gouache sepia or china ink wash drawings. The Old French Museum for Oceania in Vincennes has some in its possession. Giraud sees a subject fit for study in everything: his cabin and his vahine of course, Papeete, spreading before his very eyes with its fortifications and its small wooden houses with verandas, the natives and their occupations. And as for pictures of night fishing with torches or graceful nocturnal dancing scenes, happy Polynesian parties, there was an endless series of them! He was also very keen on nature. His drawings of the local fauna as well as his drawings in different shades of grays sharply accentuated with touches of ceruse were very accurate. He plunged deep into the forest where excessive sun and rain encouraged the growth of luscious and fantastic vegetation, which he depicted in detail.

However Giraud did not find Tahiti a good subject for study : "the sun colours badly, everything is dark in the morning and is only just acceptable in the evening" he wrote to a friend in September 1846, "although coconut trees are elegant but are nothing in comparison to oak trees. I am only working on portraits. I have painted a lot of head studies. My place is a real picture gallery. Tati, Paraita... all the prominent men in Tahiti pictured in full dress (unpublished letter).

The Versailles Museum owns two Tahitian paintings by Giraud depicting "the Capture of Fautuhua Fort, in 1847", which was one of the most extraordinary military attacks in our colonial history: sixty two naked men, carrying their percussion guns and wearing their cartridge belts only, attacking a six hundred meter high escarpment from the rear and occupying it practically without firing a single shot, after a climb of unparalleled audacity. "These are two outstanding specimens of battle scenes, full of movement, like those of Raffet, with the warmth of Ducamp's paintings yet executed with intensity, simplicity and a refrained spirit as the action has been seen in its reality.

When he returned to France in January 1848, the Duke of Montebello who was the Minister then for the Admiralty and the Colonies, asked if he could see Giraud's sketch pad and the paintings he brought back from the South Sea Islands. Almost immediately afterwards, a number of these sketches were reproduced in the "Illustration" as Souvenirs from Tahiti.

Following this visit, Giraud exhibited at the Academy, in 1853, some "Souvenirs of Tahiti"; in 1854, an "End of the War in Tahiti", and later on a "Portrait" of Bruat, the governor, as well as various oil studies of "vahine". These paintings are now scattered among private collections and we do not know what became of them.

All the same, you must go to the history room in the Tahiti and Islands Museum in Punaruu and see for yourself. In 1851, the French Government, wishing to honor Pomare IV, had given Giraud, who was then retired and living in France, a sum of six hundred francs for a life size portrait of Queen Pomare, painted in oil. This picture has almost miraculously survived the carelessness of the Pomares. It stands as a homage to Tahiti, by this Parisian painter known in the artistic circles in the capital as "Giraud, the Tahitian".

There is another French name that we must not forget to mention and that is the one of Max Radiguet, a naval writer, attached as Secretary to Admiral Dupetit-Thouars on board the "White Queen" in 1842. We owe a choice of stories to Radiguet from the Marquesas and which were first printed in the "Two worlds' Review" in 1859 under the title of "the last savages. Souvenirs and landscapes of the South Sea Islands".

Radiguet was also a sketching artist. A Parisian editor who was re-editing his book in 1929 added fifteen more sketches, which reproduced in black and white and much smaller, watercolors selected from an "Album" by the author. These prints only give us a poor idea of the value of this collection, which was unfortunately not edited. There were about sixty Marquesan or Tahitian works, in pencil or watercolor, mere sketches or more serious studies, of great documentary value.

A few years after the appearance of Le jeune and Radiguet, another anonymous sketching artist came into the limelight: the Museum of African and Oceanic Arts in fact owns a Tahitian "Album" (1846) containing eighteen watercolor drawings, a naive graphic account of a military tour round the island which took place at the time of Governor de La Richerie. They depict troups marching, quarters, local views, festivities or receptions. The artist possesses both a sense of mass composition as well as a taste for details.